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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I hate screencasts. They force you to sit around watching, don't let you cut and paste or easily skim the content, and of course aren't like sitting next to someone in that you can't stop the guy talking and ask him a question.

On the other hand, I'd love to see some good Rails articles.

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Screencasts are one of the things that attracted me to Ruby in the first place. A few years ago I was debating between Ruby and few other languages and, to me, the best part of the language is the community around it. One part that separates it from others is the quality and variety of educational material. Well written articles, screencasts and podcasts are all consistently good.

If you think screencasting will be fun -- go for it. If you put the time and effort into making a quality product I would watch it.

This is why RailsCasts is awesome. Every article links to ASCIICasts, which has the exact same content, just written down.

While I prefer written content eventually, screencasts can be a great way to get the motivation and be forced to see the introductory stuff on a topic. A long article is easy to ignore but if you dedicate 10 minutes to a well produced screencast, it can certainly whet the appetite to go out and learn more.

Most commercial screencasts ship with the source code. It's subjective, though, because many people are visual learners.

For example, I had dabbled into jQuery through the docs and tutorials. However, it wasn't until I got a copy of Peepcode's jQuery screencast that I really got hold of it.

That's interesting. Some people find it hard to learn by watching a screen cast. How much value do you see in these rails screencasts ?

I don't think videos are the best way to learn specifics, but in terms of seeing an overview or "connecting the dots" they work well. Ultimately, the real learning comes from the doing and by looking up stuff from various sources. To get the broad view and idea behind a topic, though, a well produced video can't be beaten.

Given that, I doubt these screencasts would be that interesting if they went into every little detail - but if they gave the viewer enough confidence and interest to know what to look up elsewhere, it could work out well.

Screencasts can be really annoying, and I prefer the asciicast versions of RyanB's casts. However, I still watch the videos, usually when I have some downtime and want to 'work' with someone else. For me, I do all my Rails dev solo, so all I have is vim, irc, and mailing lists.

Screencasts are fun.

I agree. Screencasts are really fun, especially if the lecturer isn't boring and monotone!

I noticed something while talking with people on the subject - it's not only about the lecturer, at all.

It's just a matter of taste: some people really hate screencasts, while other really love them (see on stackoverflow.com for debates on that topic!).

You won't be able to please both (unless you have something similar to asciicasts maybe ?)

Thanks to the power of mechanicalturk, I think I could pay them to transcript the videos.

Interesting idea. I'd be curious to hear if they turn out a good transcript or whether their lack of understanding of the subject material makes it garbled. I guess with enough people doing it, you can check out the most common transcriptions and go with those...

that's how mixergy does it

If you are to do a truly high quality screencast, you would need to have a script (and code) written ahead of time anyway. Otherwise you would fall afoul of the other complaints in this thread -- overly long, rambling and unfocused.

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