[irrational]

Everyone has different learning styles. I retain maybe 90% of what I read, but only 10% of what I hear. So videos and any audio are the worst formats for me to learn anything.

The first step is figuring out what your learning style is.

[matt_j]

This is debunked to some extent. Veritasium made a good video about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA

Personally I find a multi-pronged approach is necessary to really learn anything. Read it. Read it again. Visual guides are helpful. Work some examples. Make some mistakes, debug them, find the corner cases, write tests. Eventually when I've poked around the material for a while it starts to bed in.

Three months later it's forgotten, but when I learn it the next time I move a lot faster!

[IlliOnato]

For me the essential part of comprehending new information is my own thinking on what I'm getting. When reading a book, I stop frequently to think, it's quite natural for me. Often go back a few paragraphs or pages, re-read them with the new understanding, think again, go ahead...

All of this is possible with video and audio in principle, but much less natural and much less convenient; also video somehow "hypnotize" me and I don't feel the urge to think about what I see and hear at the moment; perhaps only afterwards if at all. I have a feeling "oh I get it", but not much remains afterwards.

So I absolutely prefer text to audio or video when learning.

[irrational]

Are you saying that I can learn equally well from reading as well as audio sources and, despite 50+ years of personal experience, I am wrong?

[lelanthran]

Could be. After 40+ years of thinking I learn better from books I changed my mind after seeing one of Freya Holmer's videos.

I can definitely learn faster from a video as long as there are no talk heads in it, and only content.

Trouble is, all the instructional videos I had tried up to that point were crap. I can't think of even one highly recommended programming instruction video that is any good for me.