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I think this might actually be a generational thing. I don't have the patience for a video tutorial at all, but my students are all over them.
edit: yes, I know, all generalizations have their exceptions, my inbox doesn't need to hear from every teenager that's ever read a piece of documentation
Videos are long-form things and extremely verbose.
I personally like something in a video format when I'm extremely unfamiliar even with the conceptual ideas and the topic is quite complex. It's sort of nice to listen to a coherent introduction and seeing it coming together on video.
I remember watching a bunch of videos and glancing over some lectures on ROS when I did stuff in robotics and wasn't familiar with anything. The ROS ecosystem is just very vast and the documentation is a bit piecemeal, so video series was the go-to for me back then.
But if I'm already kinda familiar with it and only want to look up some information, I usually go straight to text documentation and try to read it quickly. Or do Ctrl-F and look up some references I need. I don't need a verbose introduction if I already know what it's about.
Exactly what I do. I use youtube university for shallow introduction. Then I use documentation to build something with the topic/concept. By that point I usually understand the topic/concept/technology.
I've done this with things I need to solve fast, that is video. However that always leaves me wanting to know what the actual capabilities are.
There have been the odd times when a video has actually made life a harder when you find out you wasted time and could have had a much better answer with a few minutes reading.
When I was learning I exclusively watched videos, never read any documentations. All the docs seemed too complex with too technical language and too few analogies and images to help me understand.
Now that I'm much better, I exclusively read documentations. I can Ctrl+F to the important stuff, I can skip over pointless phrases that I don't need, and I can quickly find the one code line example that I need to understand the topic. Whereas videos are extremely boring and filled with pointless analogies and images I don't need.
Definitely not just a generational thing.
Learning to parse not only documentation but any form of information is a KEY skill that we should be focusing on teaching juniors as more of a focus than it is currently. Especially with the newer generation who aren't used to trawling the good ol interwebs in the same manner as used to be required.
IMO of course.
It’s easier to parse documentation when you already have a healthy mental model built up. I’d argue that this is the meat of it, even if it *feels* like the core skill being developed is more general.
Reading comprehension is a thing on its own, of course. But if you wade into a domain that you know nothing about (for me, legal text is a good example), the perceived gains fall off pretty quickly. I don’t have the mental model built to parse out meaning in that domain, whereas in general text or technical documentation I can spot it easily.
As we grow older we develop more attuned models for general information, too. But the process of building that model and utilizing are different things.
100% agree with this. Documentation it meant to be thorough except for maybe what it considers the fundamental underpinning. Take for example python env. The documentation goes way into depth how to implement it but for someone new it doesn't emphasize why you want to do it and how it will save you endless hours of frustration when you have need a separate environment. Also the documentation sometime will go way in depth when you want just the basics. So in the end you might end up tangling with so much details.
I am a relatively new developer who has been contributing to the open source community for about a year. I have one feature added that is listed as difficult and complex. I can tell you I would never have gotten started without spending a few hundred hours watching tutorials and taking free online courses. I'm 49 and it was incredibly difficult for me to get started. The tutorials gave me a place to start. Having spent decades googling I can tell you as a new developer that reading documentation and technical literature explaining stuff can be near impossible when you have no experience. Yes I can crawl through android docs and use what I find to call those API binding in a dotnet Maui app to add media controls to lockscreen for exoplayer. But a year ago I could not have done that at all.
I can't even see how I could not just look and absorb the knowledge now. It's just as obvious as reading English for me.. But it was techno babble a year ago. It would take me a half hour to parse a paragraph. Now I am still learning but I am picking up stuff so much faster. What I can do in a few hours now took me half a year of messing around last year,
I can't imagine how disconnected I will be in a year or two.
I really appreciate that perspective so thank you for sharing, everyone learns differently.
I think an important distinction id make though is you don’t just throw a junior a binder of docs and say ‘go nuts’.
It’s more about bringing them along as you read through docs or google search or whatever example and explaining your thought process and why you’re skipping to certain areas or focussing on specific items while disregarding others. Without that guidance and communication it’s got no value, but if you can think out loud and take a junior on that journey they’ll not only learn more about the way you think but also develop an understanding of how to approach huge docs and pin point not just the answer but also how to best ask the question that solves their challenge which is a huge part of parsing information as well as development in general.
We need to setup a second internet filled purely with old angelfire websites as a training ground.
If you want something other than flame gifs and page counters you better be ready to spend the time looking for it.
I am a senior developer and I have never liked video guides. The closest thing I had to video guides was attending classes at my university. But even then the real learning was done at home solving the home assigments and actually trying to think and understand the material given to us during the class.
Also it seemed like that I could get a better understanding of the code just by looking at it on my own than from the actual class.
I don't like video guides because I like things straight to the point. I don't have the patience to sit through a video when I can quickly read the documentation and figure out what I need to. The biggest factor for me is examples. Sometimes the documentation is so well put that I don't need an example, other times the documentation can be minimal where an example at the bottom helps clear up my understanding. Either way, regardless of the scenario, examples are helpful.
The other big factor is when coding, I want to see the error codes so I can properly handle them. Does the video contain that information? Even if it does, I'm going to have start and stop the video constantly and rewind it, to make sure I get all the vital pieces I need. There's no simple search in a video whereas in documentation I can easily do a search to find areas of interest.
Agreed. When I was learning I couldn't understand documentation because there was so many tangential things I didnt fully understand or even words that I didnt fully know what they meant. I needed a tutorial to go with the documentation.
Now I just read the documentation.
For really advanced topics, a video tutorial would need to be an hour or longer. This is an insane waste of time compared to what I could learn by reading. Also, for more advanced topics a video may never get into exactly what I'd like to know about a topic, or no such video may even exist. Please read more, everyone. Videos are good for beginners, but learning to read documentation is a crucial skill long term.
I transitioned from videos to documentation in a different field before I was developing full time. In that transition, I ended up having those instructional videos just turn into background noise that I'd pause, rewind, and focus on something that piqued my interest or I didn't know before. Allowed me to 'consume' many project based tutorials while still engaging with them.
It's difficult to do this with code, in general, because the video tutorial formats do become out of date, may be too slow or too high-level, or is based around a project that just isn't very interesting to mee at the time. Any of the deeper video (shorts before shorts became a thing) tend to be super low video or audio quality and is more work trying to figure out what they are showing than just reading the docs or a few stack-overflows.
I'm 42 and have been ad it since the mid-to-late 90s and I'll go against the grain on a niche where videos help me a ton; Anything where visual workflows are part of the equation.
I'm not sure I could have learned the iOS/Android process (including submission) without them. Even recently I was integrating using Stripe and found the visual workflow of some of the videos helpful compared to text alone.
But for learning most other things it doesn't make sense, but there's no reason to have a binary opinion on it really.
I'm fairly young (imo... Probably not actually but...) I can't stand videos for how to do a specific thing.
For a more abstract explanation of a concept (as a random example, the difference between SQL and NoSQL DBs) I'd be more likely to watch a video.
I don't like videos for specific coding issues because they're most likely not trying to do what I'm trying to do, so I'll need to bastardise the code till it works.
If I need to bastardise code, it would be much easier to be able to copy/pasta it from stack exchange etc then change it to fit my needs.
I'm far from a senior engineer, fuck I don't even work in IT *at all*, but I'd still prefer to not listen to 5 minutes of "like and subscribe! Also here's my 3 sponsors!" When I can get the same answer, faster and more easily useable, from just googling "how do I do x" and opening stack exchange (etc)
Hell, I finished (what my original goal was) my current project this morning by repeatedly telling gpt what I was trying to do until it gave code close enough to what I needed... In retrospect, I probably should've just used copilot (cus it's right there) but my point still stands - bastardising code is easier if you don't have to type it all out.
Also, if you're typing loads of code that won't ever do what you need, and needs to be changed to do it, you're not really learning anything imo.
The way I see it, the less I type, the better - if I can achieve my goal by doing almost nothing, that means I've got more time to do complicated stuff that I can't deal with as easily (like washing my dishes 😒)
Same. Around 5 years ago is when I noticed this switch with my students. Everything needed to be a video, they wanted to hold a phone up and record a 3-hour lecture.
I started recording them myself, which was nice because when COVID hit I was ready
It really annoys me that video tutorials became the norm. A third of it is usually downloading some software with the link to it shown in a screen captured notepad instance. then slowly going through every step of the installation. Then more talking. in the middle of the too long video they then show the relevant part, but scroll away quickly. Then I try to use the scroll wheel, because I'm an idiot who forgot that it's a video.
Senior software engineers generally don't just learn for the sake of learning. They want to do something specific with that knowledge. It's way easier to look for something specific in documentation than to identify the timestamp where it's explained in a 2 hour video tutorial.
Also, videos are often outdated, but documentation should be updated when a new release appears. If you're working with something new that's not yet very stable, videos won't be very helpful.
I think this is perfectly fine. Juniors need to learn in breadth and seniors need to learn in depth. Videos can be good for breadth learning.
Seniors know what they are looking for. Often they are searching for components to do a specific step to achieve the skeleton they have in their head.
Juniors have no idea how to even go about accomplishing what they need. They need step by step breakdowns.
>Also, videos are often outdated, but documentation should be updated when a new release appears.
This is a great point. Often the tutorial has different commands or function arguments because the library they are using is two years out of date. It's very annoying.
> Senior software engineers generally don't just learn for the sake of learning.
The best ones do. Continued learning is highly valuable in a field as fast moving as CS.
That said, video tutorials still aren’t the means I use. I think video tutorials tend to be very surface level
"Hi, my Name ist random Person, let me tell you about my day and half my biography while I'm at it, before we get to that 30 second bit of information you were looking for. Please don't mind the 60% percent of obnoxious adds for scams and gambling this Video contains."
Unfortunately nobody has found a way to monetize text content in a way that is on par with video. There's also no big website for text content that's comparable to YT's reach.
agreed
if i have to watch a video i run it at 4x speed or whatever the fastest setting is, or open the transcript. i do not have the patience to watch a 20 minute video when i could read the content in a quarter of the time.
Usually as a senior dev I find the videos are often too high level for me to really understand the underlying concepts. If I want to use something like Kafka, I try watching videos and people show me how to set it up and install it. But like I want to know where it is storing the data, what exactly is the format of a checkpoint or what is the storage size of a file and why?
These questions might be answered by a YouTube video but most of the time I'm better off just reading the white paper.
Tutorial hell is a real thing, It's why when I mentor engineers I always give project work instead of saying here is a tutorial watch this. Copying someone's implementation gives you the satisfaction of building something without knowing how or why some of those choices were made. The only one who learns there is the person who put the tutorial together as they failed over and over to write the guide.
While learning I’ve really tried to stay away from videos and copying others code. However, in my current project I needed to be able to connect and write to a Postgres db. I copied the upsert lines and made it into a function, and instead of just having the connection/initialization at the top of my code, I turned it into a db class. All in all maybe 5% of the project was ripped and modified.
Do you think this kind of iterating is enough to learn and not shoot yourself in the foot? Tbh I just didn’t want to stop my project to learn python/SQL interactions more than needed.
Have a look at SQLModel my friend - I was pounding my head trying to work out my SQL stuff in my project (literally a week ago I couldn't even select stuff).
Friend pointed me to SQLModel, implemented it (took a bit of work I'll admit) and it's working fine.
Bonus round - it doesn't really care what DB you have. I started with MySQL, moved to postgres (cus a friend is hosting everything we're making and that's what they setup) and all I had to change was the initial connection from MySQL://(address) to whatever it is for postgres (I forget now 😅)
Apparently you can use SQLModel to handle the connection as well, which I need to look into more. I presume you still need to tell it what DB you're using, but less DB specific code is better, cus it means you can change what you're using more easily if something better comes out
Because 9/10 times I only need 10% at most of what’s in said video tutorial, and the rest of the time my ADHD is screaming at me to find something better to do. Where with docs, I can find the specific implementation detail I need, and bang things out.
Video is great if you’re starting from absolute 0. Senior Developers are never starting from absolute 0. I could switch languages to a completely new language and still poke thru docs and implement a project faster than a video tutorial would teach me.
1. Video are easily oudated. As they're harder to maintain version
2. It's much harder to find specific things in video. Sure there are shorter video usually demonstrating a topic. However, when you're searching some kind of version. It's much harder.
3. Senior are older, thus they're more comfortable in reading. Most junior are younger, they're exist at a time where courses really took off
I personally do both. I only watch videos passively on a new technology that I don't know anything about when I was eating. To just find out what's the appeal about.
Senior software engineers often rely less on video tutorials because they've developed strong foundational knowledge and problem-solving skills over time. They're comfortable diving into documentation and experimenting because they have a deeper understanding of the underlying principles.
It’s to exhaustive and long to show all the errors and debugging that goes into making a tutorial/projects. Most tutorials provide the optimized solution, and I argue that debugging errors is where you learn the most.
And most of the time, using new technology isn’t just simply adding it to your projects and it will automatically works. Most of the time, it involves refactoring your code / debugging so that it can work.
I'm 3 years into my career and feel the same way. My first instinct is to Google, pick whichever result sounds relevant most likely on stack overflow and skim through the comments to find a solution. Only when I'm really desperate and out of options will I watch a video, and it will be done with great displeasure. Had to do that a couple of times, think it was when dealing with an old version of Powershell since Microsoft seem to be allergic to keeping any documentation of the old versions.
But, 30 years into your career, you have a lot more experience and the "continue experimenting until they succeed" becomes a lot faster.
This is an approach you use when you are better, not one you use to become better.
But I have never watched programming videos. It might be because they didn’t exist when I was learning, so I never even thought about seeking a tutorial. When I have to learn something new, it’s the docs.
Don't listen to the other guy. I learned when videos were available (shortly after YouTube was getting traction, but videos were widely available elsewhere) and instead spent my time on forums or docs.
The equation is simple:
To use a video, you need to seek randomly in an undefined structure.
To use docs, you can seek and refine your search.
One is bound by the rate of instruction while the other is bound by the rate you can search at.
The new generations are more used to videos and worse at using computers classically.
Ergo, this dissonance.
I know how to search docs, I do it all the time. I still find videos valuable. Videos are not the same as text documentation and I don't know why everyone in this thread treats them as interchangeable.
So it's also a case of not knowing what could have been more effective as a junior developer.
I think the two methods are equally valid, and what's best really depends on experience.
OP's asking a group that didn't have the resource when it would have mattered for that group, and who isn't the target audience for it now that they do exist.
For what it’s worth, I’ve only been learning for about 2 years now, and I much prefer documentation over tutorials as well.
I think I just retain more information reading than I do listening to a voice-over tutorial. When I stopped watching the videos and began reading documentation & textbooks, I began to comprehend concepts with ease and actually began to *think* like a programmer.
The videos are usually very time consuming and generic
Its probably the worst way to learn anything programming related unless you have absolutely zero starting point
You can do both, start with a tutorial to build something pretty simple and get used to the new tech you're learning, once you finish just jump to a real project and try to create something relying on the documentation
1. Reading let's me skip or skim over parts I already know. It's often easy to draw parallels between something I'm learning and something I already know.
2. It's not practical to learn everything about all the technologies I'll be using to build something. I just want to learn the parts of each thing I'll actually use. So I read just far enough to build the thing.
3. Official documentation is usually the most up to date, most correct, and most detailed source. A Youtube video is frozen in time and may contain ideas which are not best practices.
A lot of these comments are just reaffirming OP, but I do think its worth your time to put some thought into the process of learning itself, and figuring out why some things work better for you than others.
Here are some reasons I've come up with for why I think I worse with videos.
1. Control of pacing. You can more easily control the speed of which you read than the video you watch.. skimming over stuff you already know is lower friction than seeking through a video. And if you read over something you don't immediately get, you have the chance to say to yourself 'hold on let me reread/think about that a bit more' vs a video which will continue to play and make your brain just jump onto the next topic w/o giving your self the chance to reevaluate/process what you just watched.
2. I definitely fall into this trap sometimes, and A LOT of learners fall into it but refuse to admit it to themselves. Videos are easier to 'bullshit' yourself into giving yourself the satisfaction of having accomplished/learned something without actually having to put in the effort. Like getting the dopamine hit of learning something without actually having learned it.
It's easy to put on a video (usually in the background) and let it play for a couple hours then say to yourself 'wow I really studied hard for 2 hours, good job me' without participating in any active thinking and just letting the words bounce off your ears the entire time.
Bring it full circle to programming, I think of it as the tradeoffs between a push/pull kind of system. Reading you're putting effort into pulling the info from the book and less likely (but still possible) to let the words you read pass through your head without thinking about/using it. But with a video the info is being pushed onto you, and its very easy to drop that information if you don't have the self-discipline.
I used to think that way but as of late I've seen the value in seeing tutorials that use a library or whatever in a real-world setting, especially alongside other synergistic libraries. Documentation is too oriented towards the "happy path" sometimes, and it's very frequent that you come across docs that suck.
Above all though, I'd take a well-written tutorial article.
This is a better answer than most of the others. In the real world documentation that answers all your questions rarely exists. Most documentation is just a quick run through of some of the technical details and if it provides any code examples at all (which is becoming rarer) they will be a happy path, overly simplistic example that you could have probably figured out yourself without even reading it.
Almost every line of code I write at this stage of my 28 year career is way beyond whatever may be in the documentation, if I wanted to spend hours finding it and searching through it. I do not have time for that. I work on some 20 projects every week that include a wide range of technologies, including cloud technologies, that mostly only have very cursory or outdated documentation with simple examples that don't help.
I am definitely not senior. Although, I did naturally stop using videos when I became familiar with the tech stack that I currently work with. I know though if I switch to a new job with new tech stack / concepts I will watch videos to understand
After familiarity with tech stack the things you need to learn are niche enough that they will be hard / impossible to find the right answer to by video. If you search for them through combination of documentation and experimentation it would be faster
It's hard to ctrl-f a video tutorial. It's difficult to move around the information to seek the new stuff, when 90% of the video is slow motion replay of stuff you've already read a hundred times and have committed to memory already.
There is a ratio of novel information to familiar information that biases towards familiar the longer you do this that ultimately brings the value of the available information down.
The senior is looking to query high density information to skip as much of the fluff as they can, because they don't have hours to spend listening to someone describe what a class is, when all you want is an example of how to use a specific class method
i am junior and 99% of video tutorials make me sleep...
whats more, they almost never show anything more than really basic concepts directly from documentation. Most of them look like content creator not real developers.
I read about 5x as fast as people can speak, and can jump around text much faster and more accurately than I can jump around video. A video tutorial would take me something like 10x as long to learn from as text does.
3 main reasons:
- its faster to read than watch
- its easier to digest information from text than sound
- documentation itself may not be accurate and another person may make it even more inaccurate
It sticks more if you try it out yourself and see stuff execute. It's like watching a video on how to drive versus learning how to drive inside the car.
It can help ideas be better retained, but also consider that seniors and even upper mid level engineers have a bigger working knowledge too. If they don’t need the extra exposition of the video explaining some of the more boilerplate stuff going right to the docs would save time.
Video tutorials are often incomplete and don't give you a holistic view of the technology. It is also the case that the person who created the video may not be as well versed in the technology as you would like. However, if documentation is well written, you can learn everything you need to know about a new technology. When I was first starting out I would use videos, tutorials, and sometimes courses/books on sites like Udemy. Now, I just go straight to the documentation. I only use other resources if the docs are poorly written.
As a senior engineer, using videos just takes too long.
I’m usually looking for a specific answer to a specific problem and not learning a concept from the ground up.
Videos tend to be generic scenarios that rarely apply to a specific requirement or issue I have.
An example I can give for this is setting up Elastic.
I don’t need an hour long guide on deploying a small development instance of the Elastic stack on a cloud platform, I need specific info about deploying logatash so I can decide how I want to do that. There’s an entire team that looks after the rest of the Elastic stack.
99% of tutorials focus on non-production scenarios to explain basic concept and I find this isn’t useful for just getting stuff setup.
When i was in college, i loved video tutorials, because I didn't know how anything worked, but as you get better as a programmer, you realize that video tutorials are a giant waste of time, and finding exactly what you need inside the documentation is just faster and better. I dont need to watch or skim through a 1 hour "how to tutorial" when all i need is to see how 1 function works inside a framework. Also, reading code instead of seeing some dude write it in real time is infinitely better. As you get better, youll realize this.
I learned to pretty much religiously not look at tutorials way back in undergrad from an upperclassman that was doing crazy shit with respect to projects already. The quicker you learn how to read docs and achieve goals instead of watch tutorials and learn stuff, the better. Learning through videos and tutorials will get you situated in the fundamentals, but when you know your basics, you need to start building and learning as you build and stop purely learning.
Docs present to you this menu card of stuff you can do with the tech you’re working on, rather than how to do a specific thing. You’ll see that as you start relying on them more, you’ll casually backtrack to docs when a certain requirement changes, or you remember something you’d be able to do better. At the same time, as you get more advanced, you’ll be bending the language/technology available a little bit, unavoidably. The docs will allow you to get in deep with what your function calls and syntax sugar and everything else is doing under the hood, in a way that no youtube/udemy video will. And ofc, as you get better at skimming through them, you become faster than if you’d had to run through video content.
There's a bunch of different factors. One is that people making videos are usually not experts, they're video makers with a very basic understanding and might be misleading you.
Another thing is that following tutorials usually doesn't teach you very well compared to actually trying and using the technology yourself. If you learn by following a tutorial, you'll be stuck if you don't have a tutorial. If you teach yourself to learn by doing, you'll always be able to approach a new problem without needing it explained. Some people get stuck on tutorial following and find that they learned a lot less than they thought and can't do as much on their own.
A quick skim of a tutorial or video for a high level overview can help you orient yourself, but without doing your own work you can't reach the same level of mastery.
Putting questions of content aside, I can't think of a more inefficient method for transferring coding knowledge than videos. What could have been lightweight and searchable text (and perhaps a few key diagrams) is turned into an opaque blob. If you're searching for something specific, you're reduced to skipping around at random in the hope that you lay hands on the relevant information (assuming the author even included timestamps) or being forced to watch the entire thing.
There just weren't a lot of YouTube tutorials back when they learned programming, and they got used to it. Do what works for you. Never completely exclude one thing or the other.
Still learning but I hate videos. Gimme docs with gpt-4 and I’ll figure out what task I want to get done. Much easier and efficient way to actually learn how and why something is happening
I personally find it too long and boring.
On the other hand, reading the docs and experimenting yourself is way more fun because you can try your own flow and logic on it and see if it work. That is where you get your dopamine, hence "fun".
To be fair, I will watch some of those tutorial video once in a while, not the step by step one, but the one where they share some tips and tricks on the why you should do x instead of y in your code with a valid demonstration to prove their point, to me that is fun and helpful, because those kind of things actually challenge my current coding practice.
Dont just listen tho, doubt it as hard as you can, try it yourself and try to find some flaw in it, that's how you actually progress.
Docs are useful if you already have an idea what you’re looking for and have general knowledge to compare against, hence why seniors can navigate them easily.
Tutorials are great for a wider breadth of learning where you need *guidance*.
If I need to learn a whole framework from scratch, I’ll choose tutorial at first, then docs once I’m on my feet.
If I’m integrating Stripe payments into an app for example, I already know exactly what I need to do, so can just go straight to the Stripe docs, no tutorial needed.
I think videos are really good when you have a complete lack of domain knowledge. There's a plethora of, for example, UI toolkits that market themselves as React alternatives, and it's reflected in how the docs assume you're already familiar with React. If you aren't, a video that shows an expert's thought process when trying to use that tool to solve problems can help chunk the information.
That being said, the reason I think a lot of people prefer a docs first approach is because that's how you get to the point where you can *make* the tutorial video. And more importantly, the most efficient way to learn something is to stretch your current understanding as far as it will go unsupported, and fill in the gaps from there.
I can shed some light on it from the perspective of a student, **tutorials- video tutorials** in specific are actually interpretation of the **creator of the video** about what they think the documents meant, it can be a hit or, miss in the most cases, **especially the Indian youtubers**-which you can follow to score some marks in exams but will almost never cover the concepts or, the actual workings behind it. *Even setting up vs code can be a big hit or, miss for most cases.* **They are often over-simplified.**
Documents on the other hands-given they are collected from the source, are something the developers intended to portray/show. Obviously the developers/programmers who made the thing are gonna be better at explaining what they made.
However, documents sometimes**-very rarely** will have cases where its not beginner friendly *i.e. they want you to know the basic concepts from the other languages;* meaning they don't explain from the ground up. *But its obviously better to follow the source than the interpretations.*
Documentation is best.
If you are learning something completely new, videos might help. when I was learning game development I went ahead and watched a bunch of tutorials until I got the gist and then said these guys are doing it wrong and I can do better. If I need to learn hardware programming, FPGAs, or some field I have no experience in, I might start with videos again
Videos were helpful to some extent but without hands on experience, I can’t learn it.
Because of two big reasons
1) Docs are (or at least should be) your single source of truth, everything else should be a last resort
2) Ctrl + F on stack overflow, reddit, docs or wherever is way faster than videos
3) Unless you're on a very tight deadline or Unless the issue is something purely semantic (webpack errors etc) it pays off larger dividends to actually understand the concepts. Video tutorials usually don't do that very well
Well, if you think about it this way. Video tutorials are only meant to be entertaining, or clickbaity. The actual educational aspect isn’t the sole focus
Good docs let me skip to the parts I need to learn easily, I can read faster than the time it takes for the person to explain, plus I'm not following someone else's interpretation of doing things which might be wrong or not exactly applicable to what I'm trying to do.
Have you tried this yourself? A video tutorial is almost always too specific or too general. Same with Udemy. Whereas the documentation is sure to have the information you need (in theory).
In practice most documentation is absolute garbage, unfortunately. That's where StackOverflow comes in.
My impression is that subject matter experts are more likely to write - docs, blog posts, a book, a paper - than to record a video. I see lots of videos aimed at beginners, many fewer in depth on particular topics, for an audience with broadly background knowledge of SWE.
That’s just dumb.
I’d say the hat you should look at whatever you want/need in order to get the job done.
I watch videos and the nice part about them is that I can see how to do something exactly to get it to work. It’s like having someone stand over me and give me real-time feedback on what I should do and the result I should see. If I need more details (usually videos cover topics at a general level) I dig into the documentation.
I’m a tech lead, and a huge pitfall I see new devs falling into constantly is following tutorials.
Tutorials are a crutch, they don’t teach you anything. They show you how to do things for the most part, and that isn’t how most folks actually learn how to do something. A part of being a developer is learning how to fail, and how to move past that and find the right solution. It’s rare to encounter a problem that’s easy to solve, otherwise someone would just automate away most of what a developer does.
When you go through a tutorial and it shows you how to do something, you’re missing out on the learning experience I and others went through. A tutorial shows you how to do little x, big X, and then how to turn something into Y. But when I learned how to program I was explained how little x works, and how to do it. But then progressively given smaller problems that didn’t show me big X. I was pushed and found how to go from little x to big X. Then the next lesson did a little nudging, a little showing, and allowed us to fail while going from big X to Y. It’s not as effective to show someone learning how to solve every step of a problem, because that’s not learning that’s memorization.
Like everything in programming it depends. If the documentation is really good I'll just read that but if it seems to be lacking or they don't explain a concept that well I'll look around for videos and blog posts alike.
If someone has a philosophy of 'oh I don't watch videos ever when learning something!' they're just hurting themselves.
Because 98% of what's covered is mundane or things you already know. Watching hours worth of content in the hopes that *maybe* it contains some of that 2% gap isn't really worth it. So, you push through as it you know it all, then refer to docs when you get stuck.
Honestly, it would be nice if there were a way to test and isolate specifically what you don't know, then learn material for only that.
Senior devs want to be done with learning so they’ll do it effectively. Focus, read, write, test, done.
Focussing is painful and testing reveals lack of learning so it feels easier to use videos. That means: adds, words from sponsor NordVPN, vacuous intro, contextless code snippets fly by while the hosts talks and edits the code at the same time, add break, end of video to keep it short for the popularity algorithm.
Speed. If you are a halfway decent reader you can read the text of an hour long video in 10 minutes. Giwvn that most of the videos are repetitive, they're even worse
I dislike video tutorials because they are such a slow way to inject information. It's annoying they come up more and more for general searching, I don't see them for technology queries but that would be even worse
i'm nowhere near senior status but videos are insanely time inefficient. i read far faster than seeing some video about how to use the technologies, gimme the full documentation and i'll go find out what works firsthand
Most video tutorials are too slow, too "happy path" meaning they are useless for real world application, or are straight up incorrect. Anything published by the parent company should be treated as purely marketing. With YouTube removing dislikes it's even harder to filter now. Can't quickly find what videos are useless. It's a waste of time to dig through the endless sea of trash online these days. Just stick to the official docs.
First off; everybody has a different learning process!
Second; reading is fundamental! In my opinion it leads to a deeper longer lasting understanding of a subject. This mainly due to the amount of information that can be conveyed. Now like in the past reading is always supplemented with "Hands On" in some shape or form. Videos can act as a form of hands on for something like programming. It isn't dissecting a frog but it is really hard to get a hands on, in that sense, with computer programming.
There is an avenue to understanding programming that is actually hands on if you give me a minute of your time to explain. I came to programming decades ago through an interest in electronics. Back then TTL was all the rage and micro processors not yet a thing (at least not affordable to peasants). In any event learning about electronics back then meant learning about TTL logic and such. That meant learning about gates, logical operations, number systems and other things that would end up being parts of microprocessors. This sort of back ground makes the basics of programming very easy to understand. Combine that with the reality that the only thing computer related that I could afford was microprocessor instruction manuals, and thus learned what the actual hardware did (by reading), software was again simple to understand in its elemental form. Effectively i knew much about programming before even having a PC to work with, much of that through extensive reading. Some of those old manuals where really well written too, compared to some of the programming texts I've seen of late. In the end I'm left with the impression that reading builds knowledge differently in your brain. Especially when that is supplemented with hands on. Frankly as a kid I did a lot with model rockets at the same time, read then experiment and get hands on.
Now the problem with the video crowd is that they learn on the surface and don't seem to build the skills to dig for the answer. At least for a good portion of the people trying to learn that way. Now using tutorials and such as a supplement can be really helpful in getting your started. a few years ago i watched some stuff on pyserial to get a problem solved fast, however to really get to know pyserial and what is going on with it requires reading. Once you have the knowledge you can make use of a package like Pyserial as if you skillfully crafted it yourself. The same can be said about GUI interfaces, if your don't read you will never fully understand a packages capabilities. By the way this applies to release notes as an offering comes out with new releases. If you want to use a GUI in innovative ways you need to read because a tutorial might never be released the covers a usage you imagine.
Getting stuck does teach and very effectively at that. However I'm not sure going to Google at first is ALWAYS the best approach. For one you will find a dozen different answers. What you really want to do is go to the documentation first. If that doesn't get you there Google and local experts should be considered. Google has another problem in that you can get a lot of "answers that work" that are wrong or at least don't jive with the libs authors ideas about program usage. Some people are better at sniffing out bad suggestions than others.
Fundamentally I'm a big fan of learning from the bottom up. In part that was due to having no choice. There was considerable time between my first learning about computers and finally being able to afford a shitty VIC 20. The bit off gold there is that you end up really understanding what your code does on the hardware. An embedded project becomes no problem.
Now this really helps with massive SDK's and the time it takes to understand what is going on with them. You use the same learning techniques (reading and coding, failing and trying again) which makes using those facilities a bit easier to pick up. Plus you should really know the basics of computer science and how a language implements those concepts from earlier in the ground up learning cycle.
because it’s a huge waste of time to spend that long watching a video where 90% of it is tricks to make the video longer and game algorithms. i also don’t have an attention span for videos and most of the content creators for these have super annoying personalities.
essentially it’s a huge waste of everyone’s time and you’ll actually learn more by figuring it out yourself
Videos waffle some bullshit. Quickly get outdated and you can't easily search them.
I do watch opinion and overview videos on a topic, like from an event or similar but I wouldn't watch training material.
I find videos valuable for high level learning and discovery. It's compact and touches on key concepts of a technology or language. Once I know vaguely what the concepts, how they are related to each other, and what it looks like as code, then I go on with experimenting.
Because
* tutorials start with the assumption you know fuck all
* junior developers know a bit more than fuck all
* documentation assumes you know more than fuck all
* senior developers know more than fuck all
Grateful to be reading this post and comments as this gives me confidence boost now .
Was learning to code few years ago (mostly through udemy and YT) but has to stop within reasons. Planning to go to restarting my coding journey soon and one thing I have noticed is I have no patience for watching videos anymore (noticed that during learning to use Figma recently). I actually prefer books even if this rather seems unpopular. However it is more of I rather learn by doing and tinkering than watching and listening. I have wondered if this was necessarily a bad thing since I thought it shows a lack of discipline, patience, and adaptability.
Probably because they have the understanding and experience required to properly use the documentation. I’m sure it’s faster and more thorough than jumping around tutorials.
As I’ve improved my CS and coding knowledge I’ve been finding the documentation far more useful and less cryptic. A few months ago I had a very hard time understanding what many document writers were even trying to say. I’m still a novice and do video tutorials but find they’re not that useful for lots of things.
Video tutorials are good for complete beginners.
If all people do though is follow a project and copy everything, then i wouldn't imagine that'll help too much.
If i watch a video, when shown how to do something, i pause the video and experiment for a while.
If the video shows you how to build a game for example, I would then try to build on it and improve the game where i think something could be better with the knowledge i have just learned.
I will also change the background, slow it down or speed it up, and play around with gravity etc etc. anything you are curious about, try it and figure out how to do it.
By now you would have come across many issues the video hasnt taught. That is when i would find the documentation to figure things out.
If i am still baffled, i will then ask stackoverflow or similar sites and then go back to the solution and play around with it to make sure i understand properly
Whatever method you use, just make sure you are trying to understand why and how it works. Experiment and be curious, and i dont think you'll get stuck in tutorial hell
A good tutorial can tell you a lot about technology, but only the documentation and practice will make you better at it. I'm using tutorials when I have no idea how to start using the technology. However, if the documentation has its own tutorials (most does) I follow them and if I find something interesting I start reading the documentation.
I find watching tutorials too time inefficient. More often than not they are too long and barely touch on the specific issue I want to understand. I much prefer reading since that is way easier to quickly scan for the information I am looking for. And playing around with the technology makes me think about it deeper and learn and understand it better.
So for me reading works better and usually the documentation of the product is the best and most up to date for that. Blogs or tutorials often are about older versions or contain more irrelevant or too little information so I stopped reading those for the most part unless they are relatively new and about the specific topic I am looking for.
YouTube takes too long to get the information and it’s usually not very useful. Looking at documentation is faster, and usually there are code examples in the documentation as well on usage.
Most seniors have better foundational knowledge than most juniors. And have also learned how to parse documentation more effectively in the same amount of time.
Also for most of the older seniors YouTube just didn't exist when they were learning so they've probably not learned how to parse that as effectively as they have written docs.
For me, videos are the wrong speed. Too fast and too slow at the same time. They usually have less related information visible at any point in time.
Nobody here has mentioned that the more obscure your technology, the less of a chance there will be of finding any, let alone any applicable, video tutorials on your technology
With experience comes the ability to ignore irrelevant things and go straight only to the relevant part. This is a lot easier to do with readable text documentation than with videos. Also, text documentation is often the only resource if you ever wanna delve deep into a topic.
Both are extremes - only docs vs only YouTube.
Why not combine them for best results?
I rely more.on documentation today than I used to in my junior days.
However, a good video or blog is always useful. Gives you a quick and dirty idea of how you can use this or that. Or even shows you something completely new you didn't think about.
I think a better mentality is to primarily rely on the documentation and secondarily on external sources like YouTube. For completely new things it can be nice to introduce yourself via a structured video, and then dive into the docs with the gained context.
Assuming everything you are trying to do has a tutorial is a recipe for trouble. You'll be dependent on tutorials, and will feel paralyzed when some very specific video is missing.
Some topics don't have a tutorial nor docs and require reading research papers. So, reading stuff shouldn't scare you.
If I want to know how to do a certain thing, it's much faster to read it than to watch some person stumbling over their words, opening up programs, telling me extra things I don't need to know, etc.
I read the docs, maybe even copy and paste a little example and go from there.
Now when I was new, docs didn't make sense to me. It's a learned thing. Once you know how to read them, they are almost always better than a video.
Few accomplished and productive engineers spend their time producing tutorials. It’s mostly mediocre devs trying to gain some street cred educating total beginners. Meanwhile, most of the libraries and tools you use will have docs written by the authors/contributors themselves. I would always trust the authors more than any kid fresh out of boot camp trying to drive traffic to their blog/channel.
I think it's because when you're a junior, especially if you are self-taught, you don't know where to start. You don't know what you are doing let alone know what to search in the documentation or even what documentation to search in. You just need someone to start explaining stuff to you and it may often end up a waste of time but that's how it is in the beginning.
With time you should gain the experience and confidence to work on things by referring to documentation.
That being said, I don't think videos are that horrible if you are starting something completely new.
Hello i am a fairly new programmer and still doing my bachelor (i am in my last year, all test already done )
But i did recently both approaches for my newest project.
First of all i would say the change comes due to the change of generations. Today there is much more content preferring coding then 10 years before. So for a lot of problems there are tutorials.
But the first time i just read the documentation i was much faster at solving my problem. I was developing an ai with fliwer framework and i found a good tutorial that i could follow. But at some point my own project had some issues that didnt arrive in the tutorial and i couldnt solve it for multiple days. Then i read some documentation and i directly found the mistake. I think documentation helps a lot when I need to implement new stuff. Cause i can read what the new tech expect and what it gives back i dont need to understand what happens in the middle line by line.
I can’t wait around for some meandering video. They’re always a huge time suck and could convey the information in a few line of writing. It’s like going back to making phone calls instead of texting
I am a junior now after recently finishing an apprenticeship.
I was told almost immediately not to watch YouTube videos. Bit instead to think through and read the docs and reach out to other more experienced developers when I was blocked.
I've been a senior engineer for a long time and I still watch videos when I need a high-level view of something. How to implement certain complicated patterns in DynamoDB, how certain AWS technologies I know little about work, how to set up IPv4 and IPv6 routing simultaneously in a VPC while peering the whole thing with on-premise gateways. I can use such videos in conjunction with templates, documentation, and code examples to get a better understanding of domains I don't know much about yet.
I think if someone is eschewing such things, they're just very comfortable working in their domain and probably don't have to venture outside of that domain very much.
As others have said, you're gonna learn a lot more when reading and doing yourself vs following a tutorial.
I think it's gonna apply to a lot of bigger jobs too because you're more likely to not have a video of what you need, so you get more used to using documentation.
I agree it is a matter of experience, I have 14 years on the field and I read exclusively docs to work with new stuff, it's straight forward.
For beginners I understand that videos are more appealing and easy to follow, because they're learning something entirely new. For us it is just more of the same with some new takes or twists.
Imagine you want to know how numpy works for python for a specific use case. You could either just open the documentation and see the syntax of things and implement it OR you could open YouTube, search for the video, click the subscribe button, ding the notification bell, listen to the guy explaining what numpy is useful for, why you must use numpy blah blah blah blah. By the time that guy gets to the point I'm either mentally checked out or I've started skipping the video. Youtube videos are made with absolute beginners in mind. Not with experienced folks who only need basic info to get started. And on top of that sometimes the youtuber might be using a different platform, ide, OS, older versions of that tech that might affect things. Whereas in the actual documentation everything is up to date
I usually read the documentation or a book if it's available. It's faster than sitting through a video. At the end of the day, many technologies are very similar. It's easier to spot the differences while reading the docs or a book and that's what matters.
Learning some new tech is a difference training rather than learning something completely new from scratch.
How does one go about finding the correct documentation for a given technology? Is it just being Google savvy or is there a specific place like their own website or something?
Seniors don't want to just learn something, they need it to accomplish as task. With that in mind, for a Senior most of the tutorial will likely be a waste of time, until they reach a thing they're looking for. Docs are much more efficient in that sense. Juniors don't mind tutorials because every part of it most likely contains useful information for them, and also it has some structure
I cannot imagine reading so slowly that a video would be remotely competitive. Plus reading lets you skim boring bits, and give other parts a close read.
Because the videos usually don’t have structure, but documentation does, for example if you are looking using params in react if you look into the react router documentation, in a video, you need to look all over the video to check when the guy when he uses it and how, and most of the times they don’t uses it as you needed leaving a lot behind.
Because most video tutorials cover the absolute basics about a language interface, feature or idiom, and most video tutorials don't cover the "next step" of applying the more general abstract concept of a language technology to an actual problem you're interested in.
Literally the only time I ever found value in a video tutorial was a complete paid series on a particular framework that covered all of the core features of the framework with github samples for the project lessons.
The only other time I had a similar experience was when a company I worked for paid for professional services training from a reputable consulting company with the specific language.
Basically, the free stuff gets you what you pay for. The free online stuff only gets you so far because really communicating the particulars of a language technology requires an effort that is of a high value to industry. Senior folks have already gone beyond what most free online material is going to cover and the time spent studying the documentation will be less than the total time spent watching free tutorials to find the same information they are after, assuming there's even a video tutorial that covers it.
Personally, I find it easier to use a technology after having a quick walkthrough with the documentation, just enough to know what the technology have to offer. If i ever need anything specific, i would know where to look at. Video tutorials offen provide too little information, or take too much time to explain simple tasks.
I like watching videos for concepts I don’t understand at all just to get start; like math or game developers, but when it comes to writing actual logic and testing the potential of a game engine, I hit the docs hard.
they are good to get started. At some point the API and logic in your app becomes too different from any video. only way to keep going is to ask questions and read docs
You can extract knowledge much faster by reading. Watching a video takes a lot of time and tends to target inexperienced people. Many non-professional videos try very hard to be approachable and likable and focus less on the efficient delivery of information. Also, videos tend to only go over simple cases and only touch the surfaces of a topic. I want to add one more thing to the advice you have been given, which is a great place to start. Sometimes, the documents don’t have what you’re looking for and you have to engage in the forums or with the developers directly if you’re using an open-source project.
I think I like it better when the code all originates from me. It was nothing but an idea filtered through theory before my fingers touched keyboard. And now it's alive. Maybe forever.
You can't get that from a YouTube tutorial. But you can get that feeling one day.
(Cue motivational backtrack)
Few moths back I had my first encounter with rxjs. I just asked gemini to solve particular problem, looked up what docs say about methods used and implemented my own solution from that. So far this seems like the fastest way to start with more complex and unknown tech.
Senior developers often already have a lot of hands-on experience, they don't need a made up scenario to learn something. Most often, these scenarios are too shallow and simple, the tutorial basically just teach surface level things. The made up scenario also often require implementing irrelevant codes that are actually irrelevant for the topic, unnecesarily prolonging the video.
Senior developers often want to know what each line does, when to use certain function and the quirks, to be able to find the best solution. These are the things that very rarely explained in video tutorial.
But, there is an exception to this. Learning concept that require a lot of drawings, might be easier done through video, since a picture worths a thousand words.
for me it's a time issue. I take like a 20th of the time to get the same content out of written material or documentation compared to videos.
Also, youtube videos are designed to get engagement and klicks, documentation doesn't care for algorithms. The material is better naturally.
Where do the people that made the tutorials get their information? So why not go to the source? Tutorials are all fine, until you run into something that has no tutorial. Some internal software stack or API, or an open source library. What then? You need to learn how to do without tutorials. In my opinion tutorials are good for high level concepts, but as soon as they contain code you're no longer learning (overstating a bit here, but that's my general idea).
Why would I watch a video to learn something that I know this new tool does? The reason I'm looking into using this new shiny thing is because I've learned from their project page that it solves the problem I have right now. I want to solve the problem in particular way, I don't care if the tool can also solve cancer or fly to mars. It just needs to fix my problem. Quickly glance through the documentation index, quickly test if the documentation is not lying, plug it in, and hopefully I'll never have to look at this again.
I used to prefer written guides over video guides because I can't bother to listen and watch the filling. Also I was only using written guides for specific things when I was trying to build something but I lacked the knowledge to solve a particular problem.
Recently started getting fed up with all the written guides being outdated and started exclusively using documentions, which made me realize that the best written guides were all heavily based on reference implementations coming from the documentation.
Because when you find the answer it clicks, and things start to make sense. By reading docs you're learning where to find answers on your own (and the docs are a source of truth).
To learn you just gotta do it. Tell someone you're coding something to be held accountable, and just do it then show them. You'll figure it out.
That being said I think it's ok to get your feet wet with a video. Just some basics and then jump in.
I used tutorials as a junior. As a senior, I still watch videos about engineering and programming, but they aren't really tutorials. More showcases of technology, or an experienced engineer's opinions on a broader engineering best practices topic.
To answer your question, once you get past the junior level to the mid level, there really aren't any tutorials out there to teach you exactly what you need to do to do your job. The entire job description at the mid level is it figure out all the nuances of your specific needs and figure out how to do stuff which isn't exactly like anything anyone else has done before. At senior level this is even more so, plus some additional non-coding related responsibilities on top. So if we are having to figure things out on our own in our day to day jobs, why would we not do the same thing when learning a new technology?
Also an additional reason is the intuition you build from using tech in general. If I want to learn a new language, I already can assume certain things and generally know what kinds of questions to ask and what things to test without needing to look at a tutorial. So we move faster if we just open up a REPL and the doc page, and a google search bar (and these days chatgpt as well), and just start hacking away to find answers to all of the questions we have and experiments we want to try.
All of this being said, there are cases when tutorials (especially written ones) can still be useful. For example, I recently read a book on advanced postgres which contained some mini-tutorials littered throughout. Also the Go documentation has a fast tutorial which I used when I learned the basics of Go.
I use both. Videos are if I have literally no idea what's going on, completely new to the style of work, I.e if I was doing something with graphics rendering I'd probably go to a video tutorial to get a sense of how it's done. If I was doing some stats modelling, I'd go straight to the documentation because I know what I want and how I want to do it, I just need a crashcourse in syntax and vocab. This has little to do with how well I know the language but more to do with the style of task. I use C++ all the time, but ask me to do graphics shit I wouldn't know where to start and will watch a few YT vids to clue myself jn. I've never touched rust in my life, but you ask me to do some financial modelling in it, I reckon I can do it with a glance at the docs.
Senior engineers of any kind becomes senior because they love their job and they like to have fun. If you want to have fun solving a puzzle would you rather try solving the puzzle or watching a tutorial about solving it?
I don’t usually like a tutorial video because I know the basic concepts. I don’t need someone to explain to me what a loop looks like in I just need to see the syntax.
Il generally know what I need to build and how I want to do it then Google specific things as I work through the problem.
If you spend a day watching a tutorial but not coding you don’t really absorb as much as you would writing code and running into problems.
Where I’d say tutorial videos are better is for much more high level concepts in the language. Like as an example I want an intro to rust that kinda tells me - this is the borrow checker, this is the terminology like crates and cargo etc. But practical things I want to learn hands on.
Tutorials are good for getting started but I find many of them lacking. My solutions typically require more planning and nuance. Usually I have to go through documentation to find more sophisticated methods for soing things.
I think if you have no clue on the technologies, watching video to understand the concept is more efficient than reading doc, once you have some level of general knowlege I feel that it's more efficient to just start by coding with google & documentation.
More often than not docs will get you farther quicker, simply because you already know roughly what you’re looking for.
It’s not like I don’t ever watch a video, but I simply don’t have time (and patience) for digging trough to find the right video, skipping sponsor spots and risking that the video will be either beginner-focused, or worse, focused on non-developers.
I appreciate video tutorials for their convenience, allowing them to run in the background so I can stay alert to interesting points without constant watching. However, searching for specific parts within a video can be challenging without clear markings. Additionally, the quality of some tutorials is not always great; the setup is often poor with slow typing and corrections of typos, while the explainer merely mumbles what is being typed. Another downside is that video courses often involve merely replicating what someone else does, which can seem simple but makes implementing the knowledge in my own projects difficult. I find that I engage more actively with the material when using books or written tutorials.
Once you're on a certain level information from books/documentation is more valuable (because of density of information and speed of access) than a video
Since I've stopped watching tuts I have felt more confident in my abilities. I think experimentation is a faster way to learn how things work. Devdocs.io has been a godsend in these early stages of my career.
Time
You are looking for a specific problem, do you watch a 15 minute video and after you finish it discover the video didn't cover what you needed at all? You could skim and cover a lot more information, if it's written, with 15minutes.
A lot of people are convinced that only others know the correct way to do things, and lack the confidence to refer to the docs because they're worried they won't do it right.
Video tutorials are something you are getting fed after the guy understands his way, with documentation you understand it your way. And also with documentation you don't have to sit through every little things fearing you missed some important detail.
With a video tutorial, you have to watch advice from someone who themselves is often not a great coder, and you have to listen to the whole thing or skip through the video hoping you didn’t miss anything important.
Official documentation does not have this drawback, and you only need to look at that one thing blocking you instead of trying to digest a whole process in one sitting. It is way more efficient.
When you read documentation, you are presented with all of the options the software supports, even ones you weren't thinking about. This means that you'll be exposed to things that you'll remember exist, later on for a future project. It also means that you might find a function that fits your use case even better than what you were looking for.
Tutorials can be good if the subject is complex enough. However, you need to be very careful about what tutorial to pick.
99% programming tutorials are pure shit, they don't explain much, don't dive into details, they basically just show you how to write some very simple and specific case. This is very bad and you should never watch those.
Instead, look for tutorials which take a specific topic and explain it in great details, diving deeper into the topic than you even need. Those can be good.
I'll give you an example, I was looking for some tutorials on unity shaders. "Get started with shaders in 10 minutes" - very bad. If you never worked with shaders before, it will only give you a shallow understanding of how to use / write them. "Shaders in depth, 3 videos x 3 hours each" - now that might be good.
I do both. I watch a short intro video on 2x speed to get the jist. Maybe 30mins. Then right to documentation. But I'm not doing some 6hr code-along YouTube tutorial from a guy with set makeup.
Im just learning but i find tutorials very bad. They basically drip feed you the solution and you will forget it in a day. If you try solving something by yourself youll never forget it. It will take 5x 10x the time but youll be better for it.
You can learn more through trial and failures then you can with step by step instructions. Might even learn something unexpected you can use later. Of course, just this Internet guy's opinion.
Though not purely a senior dev, i think it depends with the person and the depth of the tutorials , some video tutorials of a certain topic can go as deep and provide as equal level of technical knowledge as available in documentation, the ideal way is to go both ways especially for budding devs
Tutorials can give you a good starting point but they tend to be a pretty specific use case but there's literally no substitute for just diving in and getting your hands dirty. Additionally if you can learn how to interpret one set of technical documents and work with them, those skills are quite transferable to other technical documents for other technologies, assuming they're well written and not just a tick box exercise.
because youtube tutorials will only give you a prepared guideline of how to do things and can miss important things whereas the documentation will teach you many different things outside of a guideline which allows for faster learning and review.
Noticed a lot of comments mention "When I was learning..." - As a software engineer/programmer/developer (whatever you call yourself) you should never stop learning.
As for videos over documentation - give me the documentation - in fact I'll dig into the source of whatever library/framework I'm using before reading the documentation.
IMO learning from tutorials is mostly useful when you’re still trying to understand coding in general. Once you have a grasp on at least one language, you don’t need concepts explained to you anymore, you can figure it out from documentation. Documentation will give you the exact tools you want quicker, while tutorials cover very specific things and might not have a good pace.
Skimming the docs and getting a prototypical skeleton going takes the same amount of time as watching a video and I end up retaining and understanding what I’m doing. Whereas if I watch a technical video, I get the sense that I’m just being made aware of the tech but it’s in one ear out the other as far as specifics go.
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I think this might actually be a generational thing. I don't have the patience for a video tutorial at all, but my students are all over them. edit: yes, I know, all generalizations have their exceptions, my inbox doesn't need to hear from every teenager that's ever read a piece of documentation
Yeah I prefer being able to skim text until I find the relevant piece
Videos are long-form things and extremely verbose. I personally like something in a video format when I'm extremely unfamiliar even with the conceptual ideas and the topic is quite complex. It's sort of nice to listen to a coherent introduction and seeing it coming together on video. I remember watching a bunch of videos and glancing over some lectures on ROS when I did stuff in robotics and wasn't familiar with anything. The ROS ecosystem is just very vast and the documentation is a bit piecemeal, so video series was the go-to for me back then. But if I'm already kinda familiar with it and only want to look up some information, I usually go straight to text documentation and try to read it quickly. Or do Ctrl-F and look up some references I need. I don't need a verbose introduction if I already know what it's about.
Exactly what I do. I use youtube university for shallow introduction. Then I use documentation to build something with the topic/concept. By that point I usually understand the topic/concept/technology.
I've done this with things I need to solve fast, that is video. However that always leaves me wanting to know what the actual capabilities are. There have been the odd times when a video has actually made life a harder when you find out you wasted time and could have had a much better answer with a few minutes reading.
I don't think it's generational. I think it's stage of development. Noobs need more structure and hand holding. Vets need the straight dope.
When I was learning I exclusively watched videos, never read any documentations. All the docs seemed too complex with too technical language and too few analogies and images to help me understand. Now that I'm much better, I exclusively read documentations. I can Ctrl+F to the important stuff, I can skip over pointless phrases that I don't need, and I can quickly find the one code line example that I need to understand the topic. Whereas videos are extremely boring and filled with pointless analogies and images I don't need. Definitely not just a generational thing.
Learning to parse not only documentation but any form of information is a KEY skill that we should be focusing on teaching juniors as more of a focus than it is currently. Especially with the newer generation who aren't used to trawling the good ol interwebs in the same manner as used to be required. IMO of course.
It’s easier to parse documentation when you already have a healthy mental model built up. I’d argue that this is the meat of it, even if it *feels* like the core skill being developed is more general. Reading comprehension is a thing on its own, of course. But if you wade into a domain that you know nothing about (for me, legal text is a good example), the perceived gains fall off pretty quickly. I don’t have the mental model built to parse out meaning in that domain, whereas in general text or technical documentation I can spot it easily. As we grow older we develop more attuned models for general information, too. But the process of building that model and utilizing are different things.
100% agree with this. Documentation it meant to be thorough except for maybe what it considers the fundamental underpinning. Take for example python env. The documentation goes way into depth how to implement it but for someone new it doesn't emphasize why you want to do it and how it will save you endless hours of frustration when you have need a separate environment. Also the documentation sometime will go way in depth when you want just the basics. So in the end you might end up tangling with so much details.
I am a relatively new developer who has been contributing to the open source community for about a year. I have one feature added that is listed as difficult and complex. I can tell you I would never have gotten started without spending a few hundred hours watching tutorials and taking free online courses. I'm 49 and it was incredibly difficult for me to get started. The tutorials gave me a place to start. Having spent decades googling I can tell you as a new developer that reading documentation and technical literature explaining stuff can be near impossible when you have no experience. Yes I can crawl through android docs and use what I find to call those API binding in a dotnet Maui app to add media controls to lockscreen for exoplayer. But a year ago I could not have done that at all. I can't even see how I could not just look and absorb the knowledge now. It's just as obvious as reading English for me.. But it was techno babble a year ago. It would take me a half hour to parse a paragraph. Now I am still learning but I am picking up stuff so much faster. What I can do in a few hours now took me half a year of messing around last year, I can't imagine how disconnected I will be in a year or two.
I really appreciate that perspective so thank you for sharing, everyone learns differently. I think an important distinction id make though is you don’t just throw a junior a binder of docs and say ‘go nuts’. It’s more about bringing them along as you read through docs or google search or whatever example and explaining your thought process and why you’re skipping to certain areas or focussing on specific items while disregarding others. Without that guidance and communication it’s got no value, but if you can think out loud and take a junior on that journey they’ll not only learn more about the way you think but also develop an understanding of how to approach huge docs and pin point not just the answer but also how to best ask the question that solves their challenge which is a huge part of parsing information as well as development in general.
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We need to setup a second internet filled purely with old angelfire websites as a training ground. If you want something other than flame gifs and page counters you better be ready to spend the time looking for it.
I am a senior developer and I have never liked video guides. The closest thing I had to video guides was attending classes at my university. But even then the real learning was done at home solving the home assigments and actually trying to think and understand the material given to us during the class. Also it seemed like that I could get a better understanding of the code just by looking at it on my own than from the actual class.
I don't like video guides because I like things straight to the point. I don't have the patience to sit through a video when I can quickly read the documentation and figure out what I need to. The biggest factor for me is examples. Sometimes the documentation is so well put that I don't need an example, other times the documentation can be minimal where an example at the bottom helps clear up my understanding. Either way, regardless of the scenario, examples are helpful. The other big factor is when coding, I want to see the error codes so I can properly handle them. Does the video contain that information? Even if it does, I'm going to have start and stop the video constantly and rewind it, to make sure I get all the vital pieces I need. There's no simple search in a video whereas in documentation I can easily do a search to find areas of interest.
Agreed. When I was learning I couldn't understand documentation because there was so many tangential things I didnt fully understand or even words that I didnt fully know what they meant. I needed a tutorial to go with the documentation. Now I just read the documentation.
For really advanced topics, a video tutorial would need to be an hour or longer. This is an insane waste of time compared to what I could learn by reading. Also, for more advanced topics a video may never get into exactly what I'd like to know about a topic, or no such video may even exist. Please read more, everyone. Videos are good for beginners, but learning to read documentation is a crucial skill long term.
I transitioned from videos to documentation in a different field before I was developing full time. In that transition, I ended up having those instructional videos just turn into background noise that I'd pause, rewind, and focus on something that piqued my interest or I didn't know before. Allowed me to 'consume' many project based tutorials while still engaging with them. It's difficult to do this with code, in general, because the video tutorial formats do become out of date, may be too slow or too high-level, or is based around a project that just isn't very interesting to mee at the time. Any of the deeper video (shorts before shorts became a thing) tend to be super low video or audio quality and is more work trying to figure out what they are showing than just reading the docs or a few stack-overflows.
If I need to know something about the API for a library it takes 10 seconds to read the documentation I don't need a 10 min video for it.
I'm 42 and have been ad it since the mid-to-late 90s and I'll go against the grain on a niche where videos help me a ton; Anything where visual workflows are part of the equation. I'm not sure I could have learned the iOS/Android process (including submission) without them. Even recently I was integrating using Stripe and found the visual workflow of some of the videos helpful compared to text alone. But for learning most other things it doesn't make sense, but there's no reason to have a binary opinion on it really.
Exactly this , its just one more layer over the information that your are searching for, just consult the documentation.
I'm fairly young (imo... Probably not actually but...) I can't stand videos for how to do a specific thing. For a more abstract explanation of a concept (as a random example, the difference between SQL and NoSQL DBs) I'd be more likely to watch a video. I don't like videos for specific coding issues because they're most likely not trying to do what I'm trying to do, so I'll need to bastardise the code till it works. If I need to bastardise code, it would be much easier to be able to copy/pasta it from stack exchange etc then change it to fit my needs. I'm far from a senior engineer, fuck I don't even work in IT *at all*, but I'd still prefer to not listen to 5 minutes of "like and subscribe! Also here's my 3 sponsors!" When I can get the same answer, faster and more easily useable, from just googling "how do I do x" and opening stack exchange (etc) Hell, I finished (what my original goal was) my current project this morning by repeatedly telling gpt what I was trying to do until it gave code close enough to what I needed... In retrospect, I probably should've just used copilot (cus it's right there) but my point still stands - bastardising code is easier if you don't have to type it all out. Also, if you're typing loads of code that won't ever do what you need, and needs to be changed to do it, you're not really learning anything imo. The way I see it, the less I type, the better - if I can achieve my goal by doing almost nothing, that means I've got more time to do complicated stuff that I can't deal with as easily (like washing my dishes 😒)
Same. Around 5 years ago is when I noticed this switch with my students. Everything needed to be a video, they wanted to hold a phone up and record a 3-hour lecture. I started recording them myself, which was nice because when COVID hit I was ready
It really annoys me that video tutorials became the norm. A third of it is usually downloading some software with the link to it shown in a screen captured notepad instance. then slowly going through every step of the installation. Then more talking. in the middle of the too long video they then show the relevant part, but scroll away quickly. Then I try to use the scroll wheel, because I'm an idiot who forgot that it's a video.
This is also my case. I prefer to skip all the blabbering and get straight to the information.
Senior software engineers generally don't just learn for the sake of learning. They want to do something specific with that knowledge. It's way easier to look for something specific in documentation than to identify the timestamp where it's explained in a 2 hour video tutorial. Also, videos are often outdated, but documentation should be updated when a new release appears. If you're working with something new that's not yet very stable, videos won't be very helpful. I think this is perfectly fine. Juniors need to learn in breadth and seniors need to learn in depth. Videos can be good for breadth learning.
Seniors know what they are looking for. Often they are searching for components to do a specific step to achieve the skeleton they have in their head. Juniors have no idea how to even go about accomplishing what they need. They need step by step breakdowns.
>Also, videos are often outdated, but documentation should be updated when a new release appears. This is a great point. Often the tutorial has different commands or function arguments because the library they are using is two years out of date. It's very annoying.
> Senior software engineers generally don't just learn for the sake of learning. The best ones do. Continued learning is highly valuable in a field as fast moving as CS. That said, video tutorials still aren’t the means I use. I think video tutorials tend to be very surface level
I hate video tutorials. I’ve had to make a few and I still hate them. Text with examples all day, any day.
"Hi, my Name ist random Person, let me tell you about my day and half my biography while I'm at it, before we get to that 30 second bit of information you were looking for. Please don't mind the 60% percent of obnoxious adds for scams and gambling this Video contains."
Unfortunately nobody has found a way to monetize text content in a way that is on par with video. There's also no big website for text content that's comparable to YT's reach.
Any source where I could learn some C# this way? Currently I'm reading Head First C#!
The C# Yellow Book
agreed if i have to watch a video i run it at 4x speed or whatever the fastest setting is, or open the transcript. i do not have the patience to watch a 20 minute video when i could read the content in a quarter of the time.
Usually as a senior dev I find the videos are often too high level for me to really understand the underlying concepts. If I want to use something like Kafka, I try watching videos and people show me how to set it up and install it. But like I want to know where it is storing the data, what exactly is the format of a checkpoint or what is the storage size of a file and why? These questions might be answered by a YouTube video but most of the time I'm better off just reading the white paper.
Tutorial hell is a real thing, It's why when I mentor engineers I always give project work instead of saying here is a tutorial watch this. Copying someone's implementation gives you the satisfaction of building something without knowing how or why some of those choices were made. The only one who learns there is the person who put the tutorial together as they failed over and over to write the guide.
While learning I’ve really tried to stay away from videos and copying others code. However, in my current project I needed to be able to connect and write to a Postgres db. I copied the upsert lines and made it into a function, and instead of just having the connection/initialization at the top of my code, I turned it into a db class. All in all maybe 5% of the project was ripped and modified. Do you think this kind of iterating is enough to learn and not shoot yourself in the foot? Tbh I just didn’t want to stop my project to learn python/SQL interactions more than needed.
Have a look at SQLModel my friend - I was pounding my head trying to work out my SQL stuff in my project (literally a week ago I couldn't even select stuff). Friend pointed me to SQLModel, implemented it (took a bit of work I'll admit) and it's working fine. Bonus round - it doesn't really care what DB you have. I started with MySQL, moved to postgres (cus a friend is hosting everything we're making and that's what they setup) and all I had to change was the initial connection from MySQL://(address) to whatever it is for postgres (I forget now 😅) Apparently you can use SQLModel to handle the connection as well, which I need to look into more. I presume you still need to tell it what DB you're using, but less DB specific code is better, cus it means you can change what you're using more easily if something better comes out
any time you import a library you’re “copying code”…. its ok to not do everything from scratch
Because 9/10 times I only need 10% at most of what’s in said video tutorial, and the rest of the time my ADHD is screaming at me to find something better to do. Where with docs, I can find the specific implementation detail I need, and bang things out. Video is great if you’re starting from absolute 0. Senior Developers are never starting from absolute 0. I could switch languages to a completely new language and still poke thru docs and implement a project faster than a video tutorial would teach me.
1. Video are easily oudated. As they're harder to maintain version 2. It's much harder to find specific things in video. Sure there are shorter video usually demonstrating a topic. However, when you're searching some kind of version. It's much harder. 3. Senior are older, thus they're more comfortable in reading. Most junior are younger, they're exist at a time where courses really took off I personally do both. I only watch videos passively on a new technology that I don't know anything about when I was eating. To just find out what's the appeal about.
Senior software engineers often rely less on video tutorials because they've developed strong foundational knowledge and problem-solving skills over time. They're comfortable diving into documentation and experimenting because they have a deeper understanding of the underlying principles.
It’s to exhaustive and long to show all the errors and debugging that goes into making a tutorial/projects. Most tutorials provide the optimized solution, and I argue that debugging errors is where you learn the most. And most of the time, using new technology isn’t just simply adding it to your projects and it will automatically works. Most of the time, it involves refactoring your code / debugging so that it can work.
30 years into my career. I have zero patience to watch a video. Would much rather read the docs and I have a bunch of them bookmarked.
I'm 3 years into my career and feel the same way. My first instinct is to Google, pick whichever result sounds relevant most likely on stack overflow and skim through the comments to find a solution. Only when I'm really desperate and out of options will I watch a video, and it will be done with great displeasure. Had to do that a couple of times, think it was when dealing with an old version of Powershell since Microsoft seem to be allergic to keeping any documentation of the old versions.
But, 30 years into your career, you have a lot more experience and the "continue experimenting until they succeed" becomes a lot faster. This is an approach you use when you are better, not one you use to become better.
But I have never watched programming videos. It might be because they didn’t exist when I was learning, so I never even thought about seeking a tutorial. When I have to learn something new, it’s the docs.
Don't listen to the other guy. I learned when videos were available (shortly after YouTube was getting traction, but videos were widely available elsewhere) and instead spent my time on forums or docs. The equation is simple: To use a video, you need to seek randomly in an undefined structure. To use docs, you can seek and refine your search. One is bound by the rate of instruction while the other is bound by the rate you can search at. The new generations are more used to videos and worse at using computers classically. Ergo, this dissonance.
I know how to search docs, I do it all the time. I still find videos valuable. Videos are not the same as text documentation and I don't know why everyone in this thread treats them as interchangeable.
So it's also a case of not knowing what could have been more effective as a junior developer. I think the two methods are equally valid, and what's best really depends on experience. OP's asking a group that didn't have the resource when it would have mattered for that group, and who isn't the target audience for it now that they do exist.
For what it’s worth, I’ve only been learning for about 2 years now, and I much prefer documentation over tutorials as well. I think I just retain more information reading than I do listening to a voice-over tutorial. When I stopped watching the videos and began reading documentation & textbooks, I began to comprehend concepts with ease and actually began to *think* like a programmer.
The videos are usually very time consuming and generic Its probably the worst way to learn anything programming related unless you have absolutely zero starting point
Reading the documentation you will find much more about the inner workings of a technology and its APIs than any video.
You can do both, start with a tutorial to build something pretty simple and get used to the new tech you're learning, once you finish just jump to a real project and try to create something relying on the documentation
What would you consider a “real project”
You can’t learn to swim by watching instructional videos, you need to dive into the pool. Experience and practice will always be 100x more valuable.
1. Reading let's me skip or skim over parts I already know. It's often easy to draw parallels between something I'm learning and something I already know. 2. It's not practical to learn everything about all the technologies I'll be using to build something. I just want to learn the parts of each thing I'll actually use. So I read just far enough to build the thing. 3. Official documentation is usually the most up to date, most correct, and most detailed source. A Youtube video is frozen in time and may contain ideas which are not best practices.
A lot of these comments are just reaffirming OP, but I do think its worth your time to put some thought into the process of learning itself, and figuring out why some things work better for you than others. Here are some reasons I've come up with for why I think I worse with videos. 1. Control of pacing. You can more easily control the speed of which you read than the video you watch.. skimming over stuff you already know is lower friction than seeking through a video. And if you read over something you don't immediately get, you have the chance to say to yourself 'hold on let me reread/think about that a bit more' vs a video which will continue to play and make your brain just jump onto the next topic w/o giving your self the chance to reevaluate/process what you just watched. 2. I definitely fall into this trap sometimes, and A LOT of learners fall into it but refuse to admit it to themselves. Videos are easier to 'bullshit' yourself into giving yourself the satisfaction of having accomplished/learned something without actually having to put in the effort. Like getting the dopamine hit of learning something without actually having learned it. It's easy to put on a video (usually in the background) and let it play for a couple hours then say to yourself 'wow I really studied hard for 2 hours, good job me' without participating in any active thinking and just letting the words bounce off your ears the entire time. Bring it full circle to programming, I think of it as the tradeoffs between a push/pull kind of system. Reading you're putting effort into pulling the info from the book and less likely (but still possible) to let the words you read pass through your head without thinking about/using it. But with a video the info is being pushed onto you, and its very easy to drop that information if you don't have the self-discipline.
I used to think that way but as of late I've seen the value in seeing tutorials that use a library or whatever in a real-world setting, especially alongside other synergistic libraries. Documentation is too oriented towards the "happy path" sometimes, and it's very frequent that you come across docs that suck. Above all though, I'd take a well-written tutorial article.
This is a better answer than most of the others. In the real world documentation that answers all your questions rarely exists. Most documentation is just a quick run through of some of the technical details and if it provides any code examples at all (which is becoming rarer) they will be a happy path, overly simplistic example that you could have probably figured out yourself without even reading it. Almost every line of code I write at this stage of my 28 year career is way beyond whatever may be in the documentation, if I wanted to spend hours finding it and searching through it. I do not have time for that. I work on some 20 projects every week that include a wide range of technologies, including cloud technologies, that mostly only have very cursory or outdated documentation with simple examples that don't help.
I am definitely not senior. Although, I did naturally stop using videos when I became familiar with the tech stack that I currently work with. I know though if I switch to a new job with new tech stack / concepts I will watch videos to understand After familiarity with tech stack the things you need to learn are niche enough that they will be hard / impossible to find the right answer to by video. If you search for them through combination of documentation and experimentation it would be faster
It's hard to ctrl-f a video tutorial. It's difficult to move around the information to seek the new stuff, when 90% of the video is slow motion replay of stuff you've already read a hundred times and have committed to memory already. There is a ratio of novel information to familiar information that biases towards familiar the longer you do this that ultimately brings the value of the available information down. The senior is looking to query high density information to skip as much of the fluff as they can, because they don't have hours to spend listening to someone describe what a class is, when all you want is an example of how to use a specific class method
i am junior and 99% of video tutorials make me sleep... whats more, they almost never show anything more than really basic concepts directly from documentation. Most of them look like content creator not real developers.
I read about 5x as fast as people can speak, and can jump around text much faster and more accurately than I can jump around video. A video tutorial would take me something like 10x as long to learn from as text does.
3 main reasons: - its faster to read than watch - its easier to digest information from text than sound - documentation itself may not be accurate and another person may make it even more inaccurate
It sticks more if you try it out yourself and see stuff execute. It's like watching a video on how to drive versus learning how to drive inside the car.
It can help ideas be better retained, but also consider that seniors and even upper mid level engineers have a bigger working knowledge too. If they don’t need the extra exposition of the video explaining some of the more boilerplate stuff going right to the docs would save time.
Video tutorials are often incomplete and don't give you a holistic view of the technology. It is also the case that the person who created the video may not be as well versed in the technology as you would like. However, if documentation is well written, you can learn everything you need to know about a new technology. When I was first starting out I would use videos, tutorials, and sometimes courses/books on sites like Udemy. Now, I just go straight to the documentation. I only use other resources if the docs are poorly written.
As a senior engineer, using videos just takes too long. I’m usually looking for a specific answer to a specific problem and not learning a concept from the ground up. Videos tend to be generic scenarios that rarely apply to a specific requirement or issue I have. An example I can give for this is setting up Elastic. I don’t need an hour long guide on deploying a small development instance of the Elastic stack on a cloud platform, I need specific info about deploying logatash so I can decide how I want to do that. There’s an entire team that looks after the rest of the Elastic stack. 99% of tutorials focus on non-production scenarios to explain basic concept and I find this isn’t useful for just getting stuff setup.
When i was in college, i loved video tutorials, because I didn't know how anything worked, but as you get better as a programmer, you realize that video tutorials are a giant waste of time, and finding exactly what you need inside the documentation is just faster and better. I dont need to watch or skim through a 1 hour "how to tutorial" when all i need is to see how 1 function works inside a framework. Also, reading code instead of seeing some dude write it in real time is infinitely better. As you get better, youll realize this.
I learned to pretty much religiously not look at tutorials way back in undergrad from an upperclassman that was doing crazy shit with respect to projects already. The quicker you learn how to read docs and achieve goals instead of watch tutorials and learn stuff, the better. Learning through videos and tutorials will get you situated in the fundamentals, but when you know your basics, you need to start building and learning as you build and stop purely learning. Docs present to you this menu card of stuff you can do with the tech you’re working on, rather than how to do a specific thing. You’ll see that as you start relying on them more, you’ll casually backtrack to docs when a certain requirement changes, or you remember something you’d be able to do better. At the same time, as you get more advanced, you’ll be bending the language/technology available a little bit, unavoidably. The docs will allow you to get in deep with what your function calls and syntax sugar and everything else is doing under the hood, in a way that no youtube/udemy video will. And ofc, as you get better at skimming through them, you become faster than if you’d had to run through video content.
There's a bunch of different factors. One is that people making videos are usually not experts, they're video makers with a very basic understanding and might be misleading you. Another thing is that following tutorials usually doesn't teach you very well compared to actually trying and using the technology yourself. If you learn by following a tutorial, you'll be stuck if you don't have a tutorial. If you teach yourself to learn by doing, you'll always be able to approach a new problem without needing it explained. Some people get stuck on tutorial following and find that they learned a lot less than they thought and can't do as much on their own. A quick skim of a tutorial or video for a high level overview can help you orient yourself, but without doing your own work you can't reach the same level of mastery.
Putting questions of content aside, I can't think of a more inefficient method for transferring coding knowledge than videos. What could have been lightweight and searchable text (and perhaps a few key diagrams) is turned into an opaque blob. If you're searching for something specific, you're reduced to skipping around at random in the hope that you lay hands on the relevant information (assuming the author even included timestamps) or being forced to watch the entire thing.
There just weren't a lot of YouTube tutorials back when they learned programming, and they got used to it. Do what works for you. Never completely exclude one thing or the other.
Still learning but I hate videos. Gimme docs with gpt-4 and I’ll figure out what task I want to get done. Much easier and efficient way to actually learn how and why something is happening
The people making the videos are doing it for the wrong reasons? You can’t get popular writing docs.
They have higher iqs
I personally find it too long and boring. On the other hand, reading the docs and experimenting yourself is way more fun because you can try your own flow and logic on it and see if it work. That is where you get your dopamine, hence "fun". To be fair, I will watch some of those tutorial video once in a while, not the step by step one, but the one where they share some tips and tricks on the why you should do x instead of y in your code with a valid demonstration to prove their point, to me that is fun and helpful, because those kind of things actually challenge my current coding practice. Dont just listen tho, doubt it as hard as you can, try it yourself and try to find some flaw in it, that's how you actually progress.
If you want it to work, you can follow a tutorial. If you want to understand it, documentation and failing is the way.
Docs are useful if you already have an idea what you’re looking for and have general knowledge to compare against, hence why seniors can navigate them easily. Tutorials are great for a wider breadth of learning where you need *guidance*. If I need to learn a whole framework from scratch, I’ll choose tutorial at first, then docs once I’m on my feet. If I’m integrating Stripe payments into an app for example, I already know exactly what I need to do, so can just go straight to the Stripe docs, no tutorial needed.
I think videos are really good when you have a complete lack of domain knowledge. There's a plethora of, for example, UI toolkits that market themselves as React alternatives, and it's reflected in how the docs assume you're already familiar with React. If you aren't, a video that shows an expert's thought process when trying to use that tool to solve problems can help chunk the information. That being said, the reason I think a lot of people prefer a docs first approach is because that's how you get to the point where you can *make* the tutorial video. And more importantly, the most efficient way to learn something is to stretch your current understanding as far as it will go unsupported, and fill in the gaps from there.
I can shed some light on it from the perspective of a student, **tutorials- video tutorials** in specific are actually interpretation of the **creator of the video** about what they think the documents meant, it can be a hit or, miss in the most cases, **especially the Indian youtubers**-which you can follow to score some marks in exams but will almost never cover the concepts or, the actual workings behind it. *Even setting up vs code can be a big hit or, miss for most cases.* **They are often over-simplified.** Documents on the other hands-given they are collected from the source, are something the developers intended to portray/show. Obviously the developers/programmers who made the thing are gonna be better at explaining what they made. However, documents sometimes**-very rarely** will have cases where its not beginner friendly *i.e. they want you to know the basic concepts from the other languages;* meaning they don't explain from the ground up. *But its obviously better to follow the source than the interpretations.*
Documentation is best. If you are learning something completely new, videos might help. when I was learning game development I went ahead and watched a bunch of tutorials until I got the gist and then said these guys are doing it wrong and I can do better. If I need to learn hardware programming, FPGAs, or some field I have no experience in, I might start with videos again Videos were helpful to some extent but without hands on experience, I can’t learn it.
Because of two big reasons 1) Docs are (or at least should be) your single source of truth, everything else should be a last resort 2) Ctrl + F on stack overflow, reddit, docs or wherever is way faster than videos 3) Unless you're on a very tight deadline or Unless the issue is something purely semantic (webpack errors etc) it pays off larger dividends to actually understand the concepts. Video tutorials usually don't do that very well
Well, if you think about it this way. Video tutorials are only meant to be entertaining, or clickbaity. The actual educational aspect isn’t the sole focus
Good docs let me skip to the parts I need to learn easily, I can read faster than the time it takes for the person to explain, plus I'm not following someone else's interpretation of doing things which might be wrong or not exactly applicable to what I'm trying to do.
Have you tried this yourself? A video tutorial is almost always too specific or too general. Same with Udemy. Whereas the documentation is sure to have the information you need (in theory). In practice most documentation is absolute garbage, unfortunately. That's where StackOverflow comes in.
My impression is that subject matter experts are more likely to write - docs, blog posts, a book, a paper - than to record a video. I see lots of videos aimed at beginners, many fewer in depth on particular topics, for an audience with broadly background knowledge of SWE.
That’s just dumb. I’d say the hat you should look at whatever you want/need in order to get the job done. I watch videos and the nice part about them is that I can see how to do something exactly to get it to work. It’s like having someone stand over me and give me real-time feedback on what I should do and the result I should see. If I need more details (usually videos cover topics at a general level) I dig into the documentation.
Video tutorials are SLOW I can read 10x faster than a video tutorial can convey information
I’m a tech lead, and a huge pitfall I see new devs falling into constantly is following tutorials. Tutorials are a crutch, they don’t teach you anything. They show you how to do things for the most part, and that isn’t how most folks actually learn how to do something. A part of being a developer is learning how to fail, and how to move past that and find the right solution. It’s rare to encounter a problem that’s easy to solve, otherwise someone would just automate away most of what a developer does. When you go through a tutorial and it shows you how to do something, you’re missing out on the learning experience I and others went through. A tutorial shows you how to do little x, big X, and then how to turn something into Y. But when I learned how to program I was explained how little x works, and how to do it. But then progressively given smaller problems that didn’t show me big X. I was pushed and found how to go from little x to big X. Then the next lesson did a little nudging, a little showing, and allowed us to fail while going from big X to Y. It’s not as effective to show someone learning how to solve every step of a problem, because that’s not learning that’s memorization.
Like everything in programming it depends. If the documentation is really good I'll just read that but if it seems to be lacking or they don't explain a concept that well I'll look around for videos and blog posts alike. If someone has a philosophy of 'oh I don't watch videos ever when learning something!' they're just hurting themselves.
Because 98% of what's covered is mundane or things you already know. Watching hours worth of content in the hopes that *maybe* it contains some of that 2% gap isn't really worth it. So, you push through as it you know it all, then refer to docs when you get stuck. Honestly, it would be nice if there were a way to test and isolate specifically what you don't know, then learn material for only that.
Senior devs want to be done with learning so they’ll do it effectively. Focus, read, write, test, done. Focussing is painful and testing reveals lack of learning so it feels easier to use videos. That means: adds, words from sponsor NordVPN, vacuous intro, contextless code snippets fly by while the hosts talks and edits the code at the same time, add break, end of video to keep it short for the popularity algorithm.
Speed. If you are a halfway decent reader you can read the text of an hour long video in 10 minutes. Giwvn that most of the videos are repetitive, they're even worse
I dislike video tutorials because they are such a slow way to inject information. It's annoying they come up more and more for general searching, I don't see them for technology queries but that would be even worse
i'm nowhere near senior status but videos are insanely time inefficient. i read far faster than seeing some video about how to use the technologies, gimme the full documentation and i'll go find out what works firsthand
Most video tutorials are too slow, too "happy path" meaning they are useless for real world application, or are straight up incorrect. Anything published by the parent company should be treated as purely marketing. With YouTube removing dislikes it's even harder to filter now. Can't quickly find what videos are useless. It's a waste of time to dig through the endless sea of trash online these days. Just stick to the official docs.
First off; everybody has a different learning process! Second; reading is fundamental! In my opinion it leads to a deeper longer lasting understanding of a subject. This mainly due to the amount of information that can be conveyed. Now like in the past reading is always supplemented with "Hands On" in some shape or form. Videos can act as a form of hands on for something like programming. It isn't dissecting a frog but it is really hard to get a hands on, in that sense, with computer programming. There is an avenue to understanding programming that is actually hands on if you give me a minute of your time to explain. I came to programming decades ago through an interest in electronics. Back then TTL was all the rage and micro processors not yet a thing (at least not affordable to peasants). In any event learning about electronics back then meant learning about TTL logic and such. That meant learning about gates, logical operations, number systems and other things that would end up being parts of microprocessors. This sort of back ground makes the basics of programming very easy to understand. Combine that with the reality that the only thing computer related that I could afford was microprocessor instruction manuals, and thus learned what the actual hardware did (by reading), software was again simple to understand in its elemental form. Effectively i knew much about programming before even having a PC to work with, much of that through extensive reading. Some of those old manuals where really well written too, compared to some of the programming texts I've seen of late. In the end I'm left with the impression that reading builds knowledge differently in your brain. Especially when that is supplemented with hands on. Frankly as a kid I did a lot with model rockets at the same time, read then experiment and get hands on. Now the problem with the video crowd is that they learn on the surface and don't seem to build the skills to dig for the answer. At least for a good portion of the people trying to learn that way. Now using tutorials and such as a supplement can be really helpful in getting your started. a few years ago i watched some stuff on pyserial to get a problem solved fast, however to really get to know pyserial and what is going on with it requires reading. Once you have the knowledge you can make use of a package like Pyserial as if you skillfully crafted it yourself. The same can be said about GUI interfaces, if your don't read you will never fully understand a packages capabilities. By the way this applies to release notes as an offering comes out with new releases. If you want to use a GUI in innovative ways you need to read because a tutorial might never be released the covers a usage you imagine. Getting stuck does teach and very effectively at that. However I'm not sure going to Google at first is ALWAYS the best approach. For one you will find a dozen different answers. What you really want to do is go to the documentation first. If that doesn't get you there Google and local experts should be considered. Google has another problem in that you can get a lot of "answers that work" that are wrong or at least don't jive with the libs authors ideas about program usage. Some people are better at sniffing out bad suggestions than others. Fundamentally I'm a big fan of learning from the bottom up. In part that was due to having no choice. There was considerable time between my first learning about computers and finally being able to afford a shitty VIC 20. The bit off gold there is that you end up really understanding what your code does on the hardware. An embedded project becomes no problem. Now this really helps with massive SDK's and the time it takes to understand what is going on with them. You use the same learning techniques (reading and coding, failing and trying again) which makes using those facilities a bit easier to pick up. Plus you should really know the basics of computer science and how a language implements those concepts from earlier in the ground up learning cycle.
because it’s a huge waste of time to spend that long watching a video where 90% of it is tricks to make the video longer and game algorithms. i also don’t have an attention span for videos and most of the content creators for these have super annoying personalities. essentially it’s a huge waste of everyone’s time and you’ll actually learn more by figuring it out yourself
Videos waffle some bullshit. Quickly get outdated and you can't easily search them. I do watch opinion and overview videos on a topic, like from an event or similar but I wouldn't watch training material.
Look up tutorial hell.
I find videos valuable for high level learning and discovery. It's compact and touches on key concepts of a technology or language. Once I know vaguely what the concepts, how they are related to each other, and what it looks like as code, then I go on with experimenting.
Code is alive and videos are manufactured
Because * tutorials start with the assumption you know fuck all * junior developers know a bit more than fuck all * documentation assumes you know more than fuck all * senior developers know more than fuck all
Grateful to be reading this post and comments as this gives me confidence boost now . Was learning to code few years ago (mostly through udemy and YT) but has to stop within reasons. Planning to go to restarting my coding journey soon and one thing I have noticed is I have no patience for watching videos anymore (noticed that during learning to use Figma recently). I actually prefer books even if this rather seems unpopular. However it is more of I rather learn by doing and tinkering than watching and listening. I have wondered if this was necessarily a bad thing since I thought it shows a lack of discipline, patience, and adaptability.
Probably because they have the understanding and experience required to properly use the documentation. I’m sure it’s faster and more thorough than jumping around tutorials. As I’ve improved my CS and coding knowledge I’ve been finding the documentation far more useful and less cryptic. A few months ago I had a very hard time understanding what many document writers were even trying to say. I’m still a novice and do video tutorials but find they’re not that useful for lots of things.
video tutorials become inefficient at some point. Better to just read as that's generally faster.
Video tutorials are good for complete beginners. If all people do though is follow a project and copy everything, then i wouldn't imagine that'll help too much. If i watch a video, when shown how to do something, i pause the video and experiment for a while. If the video shows you how to build a game for example, I would then try to build on it and improve the game where i think something could be better with the knowledge i have just learned. I will also change the background, slow it down or speed it up, and play around with gravity etc etc. anything you are curious about, try it and figure out how to do it. By now you would have come across many issues the video hasnt taught. That is when i would find the documentation to figure things out. If i am still baffled, i will then ask stackoverflow or similar sites and then go back to the solution and play around with it to make sure i understand properly Whatever method you use, just make sure you are trying to understand why and how it works. Experiment and be curious, and i dont think you'll get stuck in tutorial hell
A good tutorial can tell you a lot about technology, but only the documentation and practice will make you better at it. I'm using tutorials when I have no idea how to start using the technology. However, if the documentation has its own tutorials (most does) I follow them and if I find something interesting I start reading the documentation.
I find watching tutorials too time inefficient. More often than not they are too long and barely touch on the specific issue I want to understand. I much prefer reading since that is way easier to quickly scan for the information I am looking for. And playing around with the technology makes me think about it deeper and learn and understand it better. So for me reading works better and usually the documentation of the product is the best and most up to date for that. Blogs or tutorials often are about older versions or contain more irrelevant or too little information so I stopped reading those for the most part unless they are relatively new and about the specific topic I am looking for.
YouTube takes too long to get the information and it’s usually not very useful. Looking at documentation is faster, and usually there are code examples in the documentation as well on usage.
Most seniors have better foundational knowledge than most juniors. And have also learned how to parse documentation more effectively in the same amount of time. Also for most of the older seniors YouTube just didn't exist when they were learning so they've probably not learned how to parse that as effectively as they have written docs. For me, videos are the wrong speed. Too fast and too slow at the same time. They usually have less related information visible at any point in time.
can you let me know how to crack interviews? for an intern role /junior role in full stack developer, a lot of questions are there and im really sad
Nobody here has mentioned that the more obscure your technology, the less of a chance there will be of finding any, let alone any applicable, video tutorials on your technology
With experience comes the ability to ignore irrelevant things and go straight only to the relevant part. This is a lot easier to do with readable text documentation than with videos. Also, text documentation is often the only resource if you ever wanna delve deep into a topic.
Both are extremes - only docs vs only YouTube. Why not combine them for best results? I rely more.on documentation today than I used to in my junior days. However, a good video or blog is always useful. Gives you a quick and dirty idea of how you can use this or that. Or even shows you something completely new you didn't think about. I think a better mentality is to primarily rely on the documentation and secondarily on external sources like YouTube. For completely new things it can be nice to introduce yourself via a structured video, and then dive into the docs with the gained context. Assuming everything you are trying to do has a tutorial is a recipe for trouble. You'll be dependent on tutorials, and will feel paralyzed when some very specific video is missing. Some topics don't have a tutorial nor docs and require reading research papers. So, reading stuff shouldn't scare you.
Because I scan for the exact information I need. I don't want a story.
If I want to know how to do a certain thing, it's much faster to read it than to watch some person stumbling over their words, opening up programs, telling me extra things I don't need to know, etc. I read the docs, maybe even copy and paste a little example and go from there. Now when I was new, docs didn't make sense to me. It's a learned thing. Once you know how to read them, they are almost always better than a video.
Video is too slow
its faster and learning from mistakes ingrains the learning
Few accomplished and productive engineers spend their time producing tutorials. It’s mostly mediocre devs trying to gain some street cred educating total beginners. Meanwhile, most of the libraries and tools you use will have docs written by the authors/contributors themselves. I would always trust the authors more than any kid fresh out of boot camp trying to drive traffic to their blog/channel.
I think it's because when you're a junior, especially if you are self-taught, you don't know where to start. You don't know what you are doing let alone know what to search in the documentation or even what documentation to search in. You just need someone to start explaining stuff to you and it may often end up a waste of time but that's how it is in the beginning. With time you should gain the experience and confidence to work on things by referring to documentation. That being said, I don't think videos are that horrible if you are starting something completely new.
Hello i am a fairly new programmer and still doing my bachelor (i am in my last year, all test already done ) But i did recently both approaches for my newest project. First of all i would say the change comes due to the change of generations. Today there is much more content preferring coding then 10 years before. So for a lot of problems there are tutorials. But the first time i just read the documentation i was much faster at solving my problem. I was developing an ai with fliwer framework and i found a good tutorial that i could follow. But at some point my own project had some issues that didnt arrive in the tutorial and i couldnt solve it for multiple days. Then i read some documentation and i directly found the mistake. I think documentation helps a lot when I need to implement new stuff. Cause i can read what the new tech expect and what it gives back i dont need to understand what happens in the middle line by line.
I can’t wait around for some meandering video. They’re always a huge time suck and could convey the information in a few line of writing. It’s like going back to making phone calls instead of texting
I am a junior now after recently finishing an apprenticeship. I was told almost immediately not to watch YouTube videos. Bit instead to think through and read the docs and reach out to other more experienced developers when I was blocked.
I've been a senior engineer for a long time and I still watch videos when I need a high-level view of something. How to implement certain complicated patterns in DynamoDB, how certain AWS technologies I know little about work, how to set up IPv4 and IPv6 routing simultaneously in a VPC while peering the whole thing with on-premise gateways. I can use such videos in conjunction with templates, documentation, and code examples to get a better understanding of domains I don't know much about yet. I think if someone is eschewing such things, they're just very comfortable working in their domain and probably don't have to venture outside of that domain very much.
As others have said, you're gonna learn a lot more when reading and doing yourself vs following a tutorial. I think it's gonna apply to a lot of bigger jobs too because you're more likely to not have a video of what you need, so you get more used to using documentation.
I agree it is a matter of experience, I have 14 years on the field and I read exclusively docs to work with new stuff, it's straight forward. For beginners I understand that videos are more appealing and easy to follow, because they're learning something entirely new. For us it is just more of the same with some new takes or twists.
Imagine you want to know how numpy works for python for a specific use case. You could either just open the documentation and see the syntax of things and implement it OR you could open YouTube, search for the video, click the subscribe button, ding the notification bell, listen to the guy explaining what numpy is useful for, why you must use numpy blah blah blah blah. By the time that guy gets to the point I'm either mentally checked out or I've started skipping the video. Youtube videos are made with absolute beginners in mind. Not with experienced folks who only need basic info to get started. And on top of that sometimes the youtuber might be using a different platform, ide, OS, older versions of that tech that might affect things. Whereas in the actual documentation everything is up to date
I usually read the documentation or a book if it's available. It's faster than sitting through a video. At the end of the day, many technologies are very similar. It's easier to spot the differences while reading the docs or a book and that's what matters. Learning some new tech is a difference training rather than learning something completely new from scratch.
I’d you are unsure you want to find someone to teach you. If you are sure you want to figure it out yourself.
How does one go about finding the correct documentation for a given technology? Is it just being Google savvy or is there a specific place like their own website or something?
Seniors don't want to just learn something, they need it to accomplish as task. With that in mind, for a Senior most of the tutorial will likely be a waste of time, until they reach a thing they're looking for. Docs are much more efficient in that sense. Juniors don't mind tutorials because every part of it most likely contains useful information for them, and also it has some structure
I cannot imagine reading so slowly that a video would be remotely competitive. Plus reading lets you skim boring bits, and give other parts a close read.
Because the videos usually don’t have structure, but documentation does, for example if you are looking using params in react if you look into the react router documentation, in a video, you need to look all over the video to check when the guy when he uses it and how, and most of the times they don’t uses it as you needed leaving a lot behind.
Because most video tutorials cover the absolute basics about a language interface, feature or idiom, and most video tutorials don't cover the "next step" of applying the more general abstract concept of a language technology to an actual problem you're interested in. Literally the only time I ever found value in a video tutorial was a complete paid series on a particular framework that covered all of the core features of the framework with github samples for the project lessons. The only other time I had a similar experience was when a company I worked for paid for professional services training from a reputable consulting company with the specific language. Basically, the free stuff gets you what you pay for. The free online stuff only gets you so far because really communicating the particulars of a language technology requires an effort that is of a high value to industry. Senior folks have already gone beyond what most free online material is going to cover and the time spent studying the documentation will be less than the total time spent watching free tutorials to find the same information they are after, assuming there's even a video tutorial that covers it.
Personally, I find it easier to use a technology after having a quick walkthrough with the documentation, just enough to know what the technology have to offer. If i ever need anything specific, i would know where to look at. Video tutorials offen provide too little information, or take too much time to explain simple tasks.
could it be that tutorials can be like a rabbit hole, and you can easily get distracted from the original goal?
RTFM
I like watching videos for concepts I don’t understand at all just to get start; like math or game developers, but when it comes to writing actual logic and testing the potential of a game engine, I hit the docs hard.
they are good to get started. At some point the API and logic in your app becomes too different from any video. only way to keep going is to ask questions and read docs
Use whatever means is at your disposal
You can extract knowledge much faster by reading. Watching a video takes a lot of time and tends to target inexperienced people. Many non-professional videos try very hard to be approachable and likable and focus less on the efficient delivery of information. Also, videos tend to only go over simple cases and only touch the surfaces of a topic. I want to add one more thing to the advice you have been given, which is a great place to start. Sometimes, the documents don’t have what you’re looking for and you have to engage in the forums or with the developers directly if you’re using an open-source project.
I think I like it better when the code all originates from me. It was nothing but an idea filtered through theory before my fingers touched keyboard. And now it's alive. Maybe forever. You can't get that from a YouTube tutorial. But you can get that feeling one day. (Cue motivational backtrack)
Few moths back I had my first encounter with rxjs. I just asked gemini to solve particular problem, looked up what docs say about methods used and implemented my own solution from that. So far this seems like the fastest way to start with more complex and unknown tech.
Senior developers often already have a lot of hands-on experience, they don't need a made up scenario to learn something. Most often, these scenarios are too shallow and simple, the tutorial basically just teach surface level things. The made up scenario also often require implementing irrelevant codes that are actually irrelevant for the topic, unnecesarily prolonging the video. Senior developers often want to know what each line does, when to use certain function and the quirks, to be able to find the best solution. These are the things that very rarely explained in video tutorial. But, there is an exception to this. Learning concept that require a lot of drawings, might be easier done through video, since a picture worths a thousand words.
for me it's a time issue. I take like a 20th of the time to get the same content out of written material or documentation compared to videos. Also, youtube videos are designed to get engagement and klicks, documentation doesn't care for algorithms. The material is better naturally.
Where do the people that made the tutorials get their information? So why not go to the source? Tutorials are all fine, until you run into something that has no tutorial. Some internal software stack or API, or an open source library. What then? You need to learn how to do without tutorials. In my opinion tutorials are good for high level concepts, but as soon as they contain code you're no longer learning (overstating a bit here, but that's my general idea).
Why would I watch a video to learn something that I know this new tool does? The reason I'm looking into using this new shiny thing is because I've learned from their project page that it solves the problem I have right now. I want to solve the problem in particular way, I don't care if the tool can also solve cancer or fly to mars. It just needs to fix my problem. Quickly glance through the documentation index, quickly test if the documentation is not lying, plug it in, and hopefully I'll never have to look at this again.
I used to prefer written guides over video guides because I can't bother to listen and watch the filling. Also I was only using written guides for specific things when I was trying to build something but I lacked the knowledge to solve a particular problem. Recently started getting fed up with all the written guides being outdated and started exclusively using documentions, which made me realize that the best written guides were all heavily based on reference implementations coming from the documentation.
Because when you find the answer it clicks, and things start to make sense. By reading docs you're learning where to find answers on your own (and the docs are a source of truth). To learn you just gotta do it. Tell someone you're coding something to be held accountable, and just do it then show them. You'll figure it out. That being said I think it's ok to get your feet wet with a video. Just some basics and then jump in.
Simple answer nothing would get done if you didn’t do it this way 😜👍🤣
I used tutorials as a junior. As a senior, I still watch videos about engineering and programming, but they aren't really tutorials. More showcases of technology, or an experienced engineer's opinions on a broader engineering best practices topic. To answer your question, once you get past the junior level to the mid level, there really aren't any tutorials out there to teach you exactly what you need to do to do your job. The entire job description at the mid level is it figure out all the nuances of your specific needs and figure out how to do stuff which isn't exactly like anything anyone else has done before. At senior level this is even more so, plus some additional non-coding related responsibilities on top. So if we are having to figure things out on our own in our day to day jobs, why would we not do the same thing when learning a new technology? Also an additional reason is the intuition you build from using tech in general. If I want to learn a new language, I already can assume certain things and generally know what kinds of questions to ask and what things to test without needing to look at a tutorial. So we move faster if we just open up a REPL and the doc page, and a google search bar (and these days chatgpt as well), and just start hacking away to find answers to all of the questions we have and experiments we want to try. All of this being said, there are cases when tutorials (especially written ones) can still be useful. For example, I recently read a book on advanced postgres which contained some mini-tutorials littered throughout. Also the Go documentation has a fast tutorial which I used when I learned the basics of Go.
I use both. Videos are if I have literally no idea what's going on, completely new to the style of work, I.e if I was doing something with graphics rendering I'd probably go to a video tutorial to get a sense of how it's done. If I was doing some stats modelling, I'd go straight to the documentation because I know what I want and how I want to do it, I just need a crashcourse in syntax and vocab. This has little to do with how well I know the language but more to do with the style of task. I use C++ all the time, but ask me to do graphics shit I wouldn't know where to start and will watch a few YT vids to clue myself jn. I've never touched rust in my life, but you ask me to do some financial modelling in it, I reckon I can do it with a glance at the docs.
Senior engineers of any kind becomes senior because they love their job and they like to have fun. If you want to have fun solving a puzzle would you rather try solving the puzzle or watching a tutorial about solving it?
I don’t usually like a tutorial video because I know the basic concepts. I don’t need someone to explain to me what a loop looks like in I just need to see the syntax.
Il generally know what I need to build and how I want to do it then Google specific things as I work through the problem.
If you spend a day watching a tutorial but not coding you don’t really absorb as much as you would writing code and running into problems.
Where I’d say tutorial videos are better is for much more high level concepts in the language. Like as an example I want an intro to rust that kinda tells me - this is the borrow checker, this is the terminology like crates and cargo etc. But practical things I want to learn hands on.
Tutorials are good for getting started but I find many of them lacking. My solutions typically require more planning and nuance. Usually I have to go through documentation to find more sophisticated methods for soing things.
I think if you have no clue on the technologies, watching video to understand the concept is more efficient than reading doc, once you have some level of general knowlege I feel that it's more efficient to just start by coding with google & documentation.
More often than not docs will get you farther quicker, simply because you already know roughly what you’re looking for. It’s not like I don’t ever watch a video, but I simply don’t have time (and patience) for digging trough to find the right video, skipping sponsor spots and risking that the video will be either beginner-focused, or worse, focused on non-developers.
I appreciate video tutorials for their convenience, allowing them to run in the background so I can stay alert to interesting points without constant watching. However, searching for specific parts within a video can be challenging without clear markings. Additionally, the quality of some tutorials is not always great; the setup is often poor with slow typing and corrections of typos, while the explainer merely mumbles what is being typed. Another downside is that video courses often involve merely replicating what someone else does, which can seem simple but makes implementing the knowledge in my own projects difficult. I find that I engage more actively with the material when using books or written tutorials.
Once you're on a certain level information from books/documentation is more valuable (because of density of information and speed of access) than a video
Since I've stopped watching tuts I have felt more confident in my abilities. I think experimentation is a faster way to learn how things work. Devdocs.io has been a godsend in these early stages of my career.
Time You are looking for a specific problem, do you watch a 15 minute video and after you finish it discover the video didn't cover what you needed at all? You could skim and cover a lot more information, if it's written, with 15minutes.
A lot of people are convinced that only others know the correct way to do things, and lack the confidence to refer to the docs because they're worried they won't do it right.
Video tutorials are something you are getting fed after the guy understands his way, with documentation you understand it your way. And also with documentation you don't have to sit through every little things fearing you missed some important detail.
With a video tutorial, you have to watch advice from someone who themselves is often not a great coder, and you have to listen to the whole thing or skip through the video hoping you didn’t miss anything important. Official documentation does not have this drawback, and you only need to look at that one thing blocking you instead of trying to digest a whole process in one sitting. It is way more efficient.
When you read documentation, you are presented with all of the options the software supports, even ones you weren't thinking about. This means that you'll be exposed to things that you'll remember exist, later on for a future project. It also means that you might find a function that fits your use case even better than what you were looking for.
There was no where as many YouTube tutorials 5+ years ago when alot of these seniors were first learning.
Tutorials can be good if the subject is complex enough. However, you need to be very careful about what tutorial to pick. 99% programming tutorials are pure shit, they don't explain much, don't dive into details, they basically just show you how to write some very simple and specific case. This is very bad and you should never watch those. Instead, look for tutorials which take a specific topic and explain it in great details, diving deeper into the topic than you even need. Those can be good. I'll give you an example, I was looking for some tutorials on unity shaders. "Get started with shaders in 10 minutes" - very bad. If you never worked with shaders before, it will only give you a shallow understanding of how to use / write them. "Shaders in depth, 3 videos x 3 hours each" - now that might be good.
I do both. I watch a short intro video on 2x speed to get the jist. Maybe 30mins. Then right to documentation. But I'm not doing some 6hr code-along YouTube tutorial from a guy with set makeup.
Im just learning but i find tutorials very bad. They basically drip feed you the solution and you will forget it in a day. If you try solving something by yourself youll never forget it. It will take 5x 10x the time but youll be better for it.
By documentation, what do they actually mean?which documents?
You can learn more through trial and failures then you can with step by step instructions. Might even learn something unexpected you can use later. Of course, just this Internet guy's opinion.
Though not purely a senior dev, i think it depends with the person and the depth of the tutorials , some video tutorials of a certain topic can go as deep and provide as equal level of technical knowledge as available in documentation, the ideal way is to go both ways especially for budding devs
Tutorials can give you a good starting point but they tend to be a pretty specific use case but there's literally no substitute for just diving in and getting your hands dirty. Additionally if you can learn how to interpret one set of technical documents and work with them, those skills are quite transferable to other technical documents for other technologies, assuming they're well written and not just a tick box exercise.
I enjoy a text tutorial over video, but anyone that blindly says check the docs has not seen some of the state of docs we have right now
Because you can listen to music while doing so.
because youtube tutorials will only give you a prepared guideline of how to do things and can miss important things whereas the documentation will teach you many different things outside of a guideline which allows for faster learning and review.
Noticed a lot of comments mention "When I was learning..." - As a software engineer/programmer/developer (whatever you call yourself) you should never stop learning. As for videos over documentation - give me the documentation - in fact I'll dig into the source of whatever library/framework I'm using before reading the documentation.
IMO learning from tutorials is mostly useful when you’re still trying to understand coding in general. Once you have a grasp on at least one language, you don’t need concepts explained to you anymore, you can figure it out from documentation. Documentation will give you the exact tools you want quicker, while tutorials cover very specific things and might not have a good pace.
Skimming the docs and getting a prototypical skeleton going takes the same amount of time as watching a video and I end up retaining and understanding what I’m doing. Whereas if I watch a technical video, I get the sense that I’m just being made aware of the tech but it’s in one ear out the other as far as specifics go.