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Comment by meritt | Hacker News Reader

> And new generations are opting for YouTube to self-teach over books

I'm definitely in the older generation because it's completely mind-boggling to me how someone effectively learns to code from watching a video tutorial. You can't flip back to a page, bookmark a link, copy text, zoom-in to see exactly what was done, etc. It feels like you're inherently missing out on so much you gain from a book or a text-filled website. MOOCs generally have a great UI/UX intermingling video, text content, and usually a REPL of some sort... but YouTube videos?

Is this a huge flaw in my learning ability or is there some secret to effectively learning these sort of skills via video?

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I'm not sure it's generational. I've always encountered developers who prefer to learn from people rather than words. I think the difference here is that now that YouTube has come along these developers are catered to more, so the people who prefer to learn this way have a better choice.

I don't really see any advantage to video over text / rich documents for learning development topics, and I see several downsides. But perhaps I'm biased, because I'm like you and very strongly prefer words.

I expect improvements to the technology will help alleviate some of the downsides to video in the long run as well. Are there any video platforms widely used for developers that let you do a full-text search over the transcript for code and then jump to a point from a list of results? Because that at the very least is a dealbreaker for me.

There are lots of secrets you can pick up watching videos. Books glaze over some details like IDE choices and how to set up dev environments, but you get to see all that watching someone code from scratch

Don’t knock it until you try it. I’ve learned a great ton from YouTube videos or just watching the videos in sequence on Frontend Masters. Watching them at an increased speed let’s me cover a lot of ground very quickly. I also like writing down headers of important topics, and then going back and doing research on those topics and essentially trying to write a brief book in my own words on everything. Helps me get a deeper understanding, ensure I’m actually learning stuff, and be able to come back to things for reference. See: https://baron816.gitbooks.io/good-stuff-to-know/content/

Not only that, but when the speaker starts going over "fluff" (or stuff you already know), it's easy to pull up a spare article or resource in another browser and multitask until we're back on track.

> Don’t knock it until you try it.

I've tried it, and found video quite good for conveying emotional content, general high-level overviews, and general feeling of comfort with the shape of a topic, but quite bad at detailed technical information.

That's not saying that they aren't useful: I find videos that provide overview of material provided in detail in a textual medium to be quite useful. But if I had to do one or the other alone for learning technical material, it would be textual media over video 100% of the time.

If you're the older generation, then so am I, and I'm not even 30. Video is garbage, for me, and I really wish people would just write up their materials, because they are essentially useless to me in that format.

Don't get me started about searching for how to configure/troubleshoot a piece of software and the best answer lives inside a 60-second video.

Webdriver.io literally has gifs of themselves typing in the terminal as documentation. Wtf.

Videos are dynamic. They are the closest medium currently we can get to pretending we're inside the presenter's head in real time (I'm thinking of khan-academy style videos). To experience how an expert solves a problem and the steps they go though is great and is hard to convey though a book (you would essentially need a flip-book or multi-step diagrams that get very big very fast and it's also hard to convey the temporal aspect of the process that's being explained).

Video to me is just to give you a rough orientation and a small amount of depth on a broad set of ideas.

after i watch a talk about new features in [insert language] sometime later i'll be writing something and remember that feature, and off to google or github i'll go to find how exactly to imeplement it or the specific syntax.

That's what documentation and github repos are for. Video is for the discussion section.

And you can seek to any point in a video you like. The best videos are organized as playlists of chapters, and/or contain a table of contents with links to that time in the video.

Videos (and talks for that matter) are good a giving a quick over and showing you what is possible (i.e. getting you into a position where you know what you don't know). Books are good ways to dive deep into things you already know you want to learn.

I don’t think it’s either-or. I find video tutorials incredibly helpful. I’m a fan of SafariBooksOnline where you get full texts and hours-long professional videos.

You just need to know about these keys on Youtube: Pressing ">" speeds up the video, "<" - slows it down. "f" - toggles fullscreen, "c" - captions. You can be very fast reader, but you can't keep up with me when I'm watching videos in 2x.

Horses for courses. Video tutorials are great for things where you have to find some obscure menu item, or otherwise perform a non-obvious "secret GUI handshake" to access a feature or perform a task. For learning to how to actually write code, they're awful, for all of the reasons you mention.

Many of us learned in classrooms. At the end of the day you have to sit down at a keyboard and try things. How your filing your head before that I think comes down to the learning styles you’re comfortable with.

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