As for courses I think the money would be better spent on getting some hardware from ebay or similar sites to play with you could probably resell it to make some money back and in the long rung nothing beats hands on.
This is what I did, even though I was enrolled in a class that had plc training. I first bought a ten point micrologix 1000 off eBay for under $100, a generic USB adapter, and downloaded the free version of Rslogix and Rslinx. I bought the PDF version of Plc Professor's training book. I highly recommend it.