Hacker News Reader

Comment by gprasanth | Hacker News Reader

Why take all the pain of creating/editing screenshots, explaining through an article? You could have made a video instead. I personally prefer videos to articles when it comes to learning something -new-.

View on HN

I really hate videos to learn programming...I have to wait for you to write everything when I just want to see a little part but I don't know when it happens, most don't add the code to copypaste and generally I think it's harder to learn from videos.

I suppose this is really subjective, but I prefer the opposite - videos (to me) are either too slow, explaining stuff that's irrelevant, or too fast, skipping through items too quickly. When it's too slow, it's hard to fast-forward, as you don't know when to stop, and when it's too fast, I find myself rewinding too often, hitting pause, etc. Just way too inconvenient comparing to a text with screenshots, where I can navigate a lot more efficiently. YMMV.

I absolutely hate tutorial videos. Not that anything is wrong with them, I just like text more.

Actually I'm going to be working on Videos to accompany every tutorial but honestly I don't know if I'll stick with it.

The reasons being: (1) I am horrible at editing and producing videos and that time I spend struggling could be time creating more written tutorials and (2) I'm not sure that people will really want / appreciate it yet. Many people (myself included) prefer text. You can't always be in a quiet place or have headphones on to listen, and reading a page at your own pace seems to be easier than video. But I am considering it, I'll do one or two and see what the feedback is for that.

I probably like them better because, I started off with kevin skoglund's php essential training. And, he was really good at explaining things.

Also, I found the discussion on this post[1] strikingly relevant in this context.

[1] - http://jaap.haitsma.org/2010/01/03/the-rise-of-video-tutoria...

A video has several problems: - it can filtered by a proxy according to the place where you're trying to view it. - it may be too slow if you don't have a sufficient internet speed. - you can't copy/paste the code.

I prefer articles, as videos often go too slow. It is also a waste of bandwidth watching a 1080p video of something that takes a few screenshots to express.

I wouldn't mind an accompanying video though.

I think it depends on the person. I much prefer text tutorials over video; it's too much of a hassle to rewind a video over and over again to see what the author is doing.

Agreed, I hate the trend to have tutorials as videos nowadays.

Not to mention that it also excludes deaf people unless manually transcribed, or if the speaker is clear enough that automatic transcription is possible, but I doubt that is possible with programming videos yet.

Videos suck for learning programming in my personal opinion.

You can't search them for the thing you vaguely remember, you can't copy and paste code, you can scan them when they're too easy. You can't skip back and forth without loading delay.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com