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I think a lot of educational Youtube channels aren't that great in actually teaching you anything. What they are great at is sparking the interest and planting the seed for your own work. At least my experience is that actually doing things is how I learn them. Youtube can be a great springboard for that.

Things to look out for: a person you like and who has enthusiasm and knowledge.

For example EEVBlog Youtube channel was a great way to get into electronics. It's very surface level, and you have to do the learning yourself, but the surface level of what you get is a broad overview which you can choose how to deepen and iterate on. Get that surface level from Youtube, so that you can understand the whole picture, then go through the parts yourself.

For just learning web efficiently, things like https://fullstackopen.com/en/ seem a lot better.

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"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." - Antoine de Saint—Exupery

Corollary lesson: when you find yourself driven by a yearning for some overarching majestic goal to overcome great challenges at great cost, remember that working hard on something doesn't mean you'll ever get to use that thing. Those woodcutters, metalworkers, shipwrights, artisans, etc. who poured their hearts and souls into building that ship will very likely not sail the vast and endless sea that motivated their labor.

If you yearn for the vast and endless sea enough that you wish to sail it, forget the wood. Become a seaman.

That's one of the awesome things about software. You can have a grand idea for something, actually spew it out into reality, and then actually use it and see lots of other people use it, often for very little cost on your part besides some time and effort. I'm sure many people of long past would be like "shit, you all are so lucky" if they saw what we could do, and I think there's a pretty good chance we'd say the same of our distant future descendants (barring all the standard hypothetical catastrophe caveats).

It's almost like magic, except limited by what software can actually affect. You can't compile "ship.rs" into an actual ship. But in 100 years I think more of the borders between software and hardware/meatware will start to blur.

I feel like many product managers and senior leaders I know take this advice to heart, and too literally. It's great to yearn for the sea, but if you actually want to sail, you'll need a boat, and that boat had better be built by competent organized professionals paying attention to what they're doing rather than a bunch of folks sitting around talking about the endless sea.

I think that YouTube is great for culture. It includes programming culture. Basically telling you that things exist.

However if you really want to do something, you need practice, and YouTube is not ideal for that.

For programming, what you need is a computer, a development environment (preferably something well integrated if you are beginning) and a project (if you are a beginner, the simpler the better). Text documentation you can refer to at any time is I think the best. Paper books vs online articles and manuals is debatable but they are all better than video for practicing.

For programming, yes, especially if you're a beginner. But for more conceptual aspects of software engineering and system design, or tutorials on new technologies, videos can sometimes be useful.

Here's a good recent one by Raymond Hettinger on making things easier for yourself when programming, such as ways of reducing how many things you'll need to keep in working memory at once. It actually does directly involve a lot of pure code so it's maybe not the best example of what I described, but it's mostly focused on cognition and is generalizable to programming in any language, or possibly doing any kind of demanding mental work in any field.

"The Mental Game of Python" - https://youtu.be/UANN2Eu6ZnM

Raymond Hettinger is such a treasure!

He keeps things simple and in the process you actually learn.

I tend to overload the registers when teaching and students do not learn as much.

All teachers know the feeling when students eyes glaze over, something that is so much harder to detect in the age of Zoom and Teams.

PS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwuv05aZ6ug there is a sync fixed version of the talk

I think certain hands on skills are an exception to this. I can't imagine Bob Ross teaching me to paint through a manual. But programming is such a text based activity, so youtube is great at the what and the why, but text is still the best for the how.

This but it is in general better to pay for a course at Udemy. You get your money back when you haven't learned anything and those teachers are paid by people like you. They have skin in the game. Youtubers get paid by the minute so they are maximizing your eyeball time.

Yeah, even though the platform has some questionable practices the overall content and the depth of the courses, especially the top ones are well worth the money (since the course will be on sale for 80-90% all the time )

You are being sold in a different way. A successful course is one where you haven't requested a refund. The courses are designed to create little friction and in the end leaving you with a feeling that you now know 'x' and you are a 'x' programmer now.

In reality you took an easy guided path. Without friction you may not have learned all that much.

This has been my experience as well. In that introductory period when you're first dipping your toes into a new topic I think youtube videos are great at getting you introduced to the vocabulary you're going to need to pick up. Sometimes a new topic can seem much more complex than it really is because there's a lot of unfamiliar terms being used and not because of the actual complexity of topic. Youtube is a pretty gentle way of getting familiar with the lingo so that you have an understanding of what exactly it is you don't know, and what to search to figure it out on your own.

There are some videos that are useful on an even higher level because they cause you to question your way of thinking on a subject. Rich Hickey's talks were like this for me and I think the video format really was the best for that. Some people are just really talented orators and things wouldn't translate as well to text only.

The thing that makes YouTube a bit crap for learning is that content creators are incentivized to make their videos longer than they need to be, so something that should take less than a minute to explain now takes 10 minutes.

I stumbled across a good example of this today while trying to figure out how to undo a camera move in Cinema4D, a software package I don't usually use. Now, the answer to this question is "ctrl+shift+z". But if I search the question on Google, the first result is a 3 minute YouTube video titled "Cinema 4D Quick Tip: How To Undo Camera Move In Cinema 4D", where the first mention of the shortcut is 2 minutes into the video. At this point, both YouTube and Google are purposefully surfacing the least helpful links in order to increase engagement.

The same with podcasts. Even if I listen to some reasonably dry technical podcasts I always find I'm brimming with ideas afterwards having been inspired by some random comment made by the host or the interviewee. Do I ever remember much of the actual content? Not really.

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