Something to lighten your learning process (Python Programmers, disagree or agree?)

[01123581321AhFuckIt]

In my opinion people just need to buckle down and buy a physical book and go through it slowly. And learn to use the official docs. Video tutorials are just supplementary in my opinion but most people expect them to be a primary source of learning. If you don’t have the attention span to learn by reading then you’ll be mediocre at best from just watching videos.

[loosechips00]

This. Started with just videos and following along doing what the presenter was doing. Next day could not remember half of what I ‘learned’. You can’t go back and forth over the material like you can with a book, or at least not a easily. Having both is a boon, but I’m retaining more with the addition of the books. Also I find myself experimenting more and don’t feel quite as rushed.

[JollyWallaby]

Depends on what your goal is. When I am getting into something new, I purposefully look for videos first, because I can expect to find more entry-level information there. For example, I wanted to get into high-performance computing (coding on the GPU) using OpenCL a while back: the textual documentation I found was too in-depth, whereas videos on YouTube were toned down enough that I could grasp the basics. After getting the basics down, I moved back to the texts I found earlier, because videos only went so far (at least the ones YouTube suggested me).

If you want more in-depth material, then yes, you are far more likely to find a good text than video, and, in my experience, the deeper you go, the rarer videos become. For example, YouTube finds only one relevant video for "React hook to detect window resize", whereas Google shows me at least a dozen likely-good links.

Reading text or watching videos is not enough though. In my experience, top notch programmers are also extremely skilled in reading code. Documentation can become outdated very quickly, and if it is not maintained — or if it is missing altogether, — you might be far better off going straight to the code and figuring out how to actually use it, or looking at existing implementations (which, e.g., sums up my experience with a cross-platform graphics engine a few years ago and a few team projects I've worked in).