[pbrb]

I personally love it. RTFM is pretty much the basis of my career. I always at minimum skim the documentation (the entire doc) so I have an index of where to look. It's a great jumping off point for if you do need to google anything.

Books are the same. When learning a new language for example, I get a book that covers the language itself (best practices, common design patterns, etc), not how to write a for loop. It seems to be an incredibly effective way to learn. Most importantly, it cuts down on reading the same information regurgitated over and over across multiple blogs.

[cogman10]

lol... yeah.... I've become "the expert" on so much shit just because of RTFM :D

It's amazing how much stuff is spelt out in manuals that nobody bothers to read.

The only issue is that so few people RTFM that some manuals are pure garbage to try and glean anything useful. In those cases, usually the best route is often to just read the implementation (though that is tedious).

[cosmodisk]

I have someone in my network, who is very active in PHP scene. Tutorials, tips&tricks, code reviews, you name it. He pretty much abandoned his very popular website and went all in on YouTube. Why? Apparently watching video is so much easier than reading 3000 word article.

[tmh88j]

>He pretty much abandoned his very popular website and went all in on YouTube. Why? Apparently watching video is so much easier than reading 3000 word article.

Learning from videos is lazy? Content you've learned is only valid if you read it? I'm not sure what exactly you're getting at, but I'm a visual learner and I much prefer (well made) videos over text. There's a visual and audio aspect to it enabling so much more information to be conveyed at once. For example, Dr. Sedgwick's video series on algorithms and data structures has animations as he steps through how algorithms work. He's overlaying his audio while displaying code and animating the "data" as it's processed by the algorithm. I have a physical copy of his book Algorithms but I go back to his videos when I need a refresher. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wme8SDUaBx8

[licebmi__at__]

I do have a prejudice against people who tell me they learn something through a video. There are good video creators and good educational videos, but there’s just too much trash.

Besides that, I default to text content because of the monetary incentives on youtube, it’s absurd that a 10 min read, can be a more than half hour video that never gets to the point.

[tmh88j]

>I do have a prejudice against people who tell me they learn something through a video. There are good video creators and good educational videos, but there’s just too much trash.

Bad content has absolutely nothing to do with the format. What a ridiculous statement. As if there aren't thousands of even worse articles, blog posts and incomplete/outdated documentation for every bad video. Does W3 schools ring a bell?

>it’s absurd that a 10 min read, can be a more than half hour video that never gets to the point

It's absurd you're blaming bad content on the format, which is also ironic because you missed where I explicitly wrote in text that I prefer well made videos. Do you expect every single piece of text you come across to be a concise and up to date source of truth?

[HWR_14]

It depends on what you're learning. Try to learn to chop veggies and a video is superior to text. Try to learn all the inputs to a function, return values and thrown errors and a video is far inferior to text. The crossover point probably varies from person to person, and my guess is snobbery about videos is based around the personal differences in how a person learns and where what they already know or what they learn is on that spectrum.

There's also a wide (wider than text?) difference in video quality. How many videos out there are badly narrated sources available in text format?

[cosmodisk]

There are pros and cons of each media, I'm not arguing against it. What I mean is that there's a general tendency of migration from longer versions( books) to more compact,bite size content(videos). It's one of the reasons why there's countless videos on YouTube on how to create a dictionary in Python,even though the documentation has it covered wide and deep.

[tmh88j]

I agree that something like a Python dictionary is probably unnecessary to make a standalone video for, but simple concepts like that also wouldn't be a 3000 word article unless you're looking for literally every nuance and weird quirk the language has to offer.

[cosmodisk]

like an explanation of what 'this' is in JS:)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/You-Dont-Know-JS-Prototypes