[petercooper]

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

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

[andybak]

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

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

[Breza]

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

[petercooper]

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

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

[andybak]

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

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

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

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