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Comment by dfxm12 | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who thinks watching videos is an inefficient way to learn new programming techniques?

There's no way to copy and it's hard to remember where a specific concept was so that you can reference it again. Sometimes, the video or audio quality is bad enough that you can't even really tell what's going on.

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I like them principally because I can actually see what they did rather than them writing what they think they did in an article.. this is a common problem with documentation where if you follow it to the letter, there's still some other thing they failed to mention.

Articles are much better once you're up to speed and knowledgeable about a space, but I find videos ideal to set the scene when I'm totally new to something so I can mimic their actual activity in getting things going.

> this is a common problem with documentation where if you follow it to the letter, there's still some other thing they failed to mention.

This makes sense but it seems like an enormous price to pay in return for the tutorial not having mistakes. "We'll use a really suboptical delivery mechanism because it forces us to check our steps as we go".

Ah, but I don't think video is intrinsically suboptimal (I assume suboptical was a typo?) any more than comparing a movie to a book. There are pros and cons of each medium and I can't dismiss either.

I love a proper 90s-style book for sure (No Starch seem to be really good at still putting these out) but there are plenty of times where a video usefully fills in a gap, particularly if you want something super up to date or running on a certain setup (e.g. you're a Mac user and you want to see someone setting up some Python library.. that is definitely on YouTube to follow along with somewhere).

But the pros you give for video are orthogonal to the actual video-ness of them.

Your pro-video points seem to be largely "More up to date and more content is available"

So - maybe authoring/hosting/promoting/monetizing video is easier than with web pages? These are issues that could potentially be fixed and they have nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of video - linear, constant time usually with a spoken audio track. These are the qualities that I find problemmatic. I actually don't mind slides - they are linear but they aren't constant time and they work independently of the voiceover (most times there's a talk I'm interested in I'll find the slides and skip the actual talk - even if I miss some content it's worth it to be able to skim through quickly and not be tortured by someone's vocal quirks).

There's a few maths YouTubers I can bear - mainly because they speak extremely quickly and there's no fluff. I'd still prefer to be reading the same material however.

It can be refreshing to see the top coders making mistakes and instructive to see how they debug on the fly. I went to a Meetup where Hadley Wickham was the speaker (data science celeb). He made a mistake when writing code to explain a concept and it was neat to see how he suspected what he'd done wrong, found the issue quickly, and corrected it.

Videos are great when the narrator reflects his/her thought process and adds relevant history(of how things come to that) when doing things.

Articles can do it even better but can get very lengthy and people looking to quickly learn how to do something will seek short, to the point articles and missing out on significant depth.

Of course just watching a video won't make you learn something but I think the situation is the same with articles. Remember school times, the articles were not that lengthy(I mean STEM of course) but to truly grasp something you would have to go over it again and again and try to solve problems by yourselves.

I think the article have the advantage of extremely fast skimmability, you can even condense everything into a single page and use it as a reference because you can skim to the point in a single glance.

This. I like texts but texts not tend to include write's thought process but videos tend to.

Came here to say exactly the same thing. Video is a poor medium for many topics but especially for programming.

It's so god damn slow.

To be honest - it's the speech bit more than the video bit. Reading is better than listening to someone talk in nearly every way.

Here ya go (read and search the transcripts):

https://docdrop.org/video/VBrnmciV9fM/

I honestly tried now when I am back in college because I just thought its a bad habit from old times when we learned pascal and basic from help files. But no after trying all the labs I could I started building my labs and just focusing on portfolio.

For my first stab at learning something new I usually try on my own, but when I'm getting lost or things aren't working as expected I like videos, especially ones that weren't prerecorded. The number of times documentation either takes a mental leap or actually skips a step can be frustrating. It's also helpful to see where someone else makes mistakes because it's often the ones I would've made also.

> Am I the only one who thinks watching videos is an inefficient way to learn new programming techniques?

Just watching wouldn't be of help. Watching and doing will probably get you far. As for how efficient they are, it probably depends on the quality of the video and the student.

> There's no way to copy and it's hard to remember where a specific concept was so that you can reference it again.

That's true for books, audio, class lectures, etc. But at least with a video, you can always go back to the part your didn't understand - unlike say a class lecture.

> Sometimes, the video or audio quality is bad enough that you can't even really tell what's going on.

So watch better quality videos?

I agree, many "educational" podcasts/videos could be turned into a text with pictures which could be read in less time.

Some rare videos definitely are worth the time, like those of 3Blue1Brown or the excellent Jamie Windsor (on photography).

I like videos a lot but I absolutely need to write the code along with the person on the screen otherwise it doesn't stick. Coding Train [1] is a recent example that has worked well for me.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw

Really depends on the type of programming. The "Coding Train" channel is pretty much all about animations, and it works really well for that. Same for things like OpenGL, Computer Vision, CSS, or UI design where the results are highly visual.

To me videos are more akin to conference talks. They are interesting when they focus on presenting an idea, a technique or a pattern with simple code. An exercise where the code itself doesn't matter too much essentially.

The miss efficient way to learn is to use all medias available appropriately. You can integrate video lessons into habits that wouldn’t be practical in other forms.

I can't find a gap in my life that fits video.

Audio maybe as I can listen while walking/driving.

But video stops me multitasking, I can't skim at my own pace, the speed of information delivery is order of magnitude slower than reading and skipping back and forth is much harder than with text+images.

I just honestly can't find a role for video where it's not significantly worse than reading+images (+ allowing for small, embedded video snippets for things that need to move to be understood like complex UI interactions or animations)

i think it depends on what type of learner you are. i learn much easier through video than through text, so for me a well made presentation, that i watch with my full attention while taking notes (i don't generally look at the notes after, but it helps commit things to memory), is a much more efficient way to learn about stuff. shame that there aren't that many videos beyond basics stuff

bad audio is a killer for sure, though.

Apparently this is the new way.

I've seen people who go first to youtube to search for solutions to their programming struggle.

I have found myself going to YouTube first for solutions as of late, even though I find the medium less effective for learning.

So many websites feel like copy-paste jobs these days that it is difficult to tell whether someone is talking from experience, they are rephrasing something they read by never tried, the content is scraped from another site, or even if it is automatically generated. YouTube does have its problems, but it is more difficult to produce fake content in certain presentation formats.

The sad thing is that books have even been sliding downward in my order of preference. While a great book will blow away almost anything available online, investing good money into a product that doesn't reflect my needs in the end is all too common. I suspect the people who review books simply have different expectations than I.

There is value when you don't have the brain energy to try stuff out. Just watch and let it wash over you.

Nothing can top professional written books, I use videos as supplementary learning material.

> There's no way to copy

Like physical books?

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