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YouTube Channels to Level Up Your Programming Skills

blog.codegiant.io

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Re: YouTube Channels to Level Up Your Programming Skills

#23

Post by Swizec »

As an online coding educator, here’s my beef with online coding education:

Most videos, courses, and articles you find don’t teach you much. They’re a recipe for you to follow. Do this then that then this.

If you’re building exactly what the author is building, great! You’ve built it.

Then comes a new problem. Or an interview question. It’s actually the same thing you just built, but you don’t have the understanding to realize that. So you look for a completely new tutorial to follow.

This is a losing proposition. You’re learning a lot of recipes by rote and not understanding much. With months or years of pain, you’ll start to pick up patterns by induction.

Not a great way to learn.

It’s like learning to cook an italian risotto and then being flumoxxed by veggie rice. Even though they’re the same thing.

Now here’s where it gets worse: It seems the market (or at least google searches) wants these rote recipes. It’s what gets you the most traffic.

I don’t know that there’s a solution. It’s probably the same problem as crash diets and everyone asking for the best font to use on a VC pitch deck.

Re: YouTube Channels to Level Up Your Programming Skills

#24

Post by santiagobasulto »

geerlingguy wrote: post #5

In this article: 5000 words about "what is programming". Then, waaay down at the bottom, the actual list of YouTube channels. Seriously, this is worse than those recipes where you have to get through three anecdotes about cooking with grandma.

I came to point out the same thing. Is it just to make it look long? Or is to appeal Google/Medium algorithms?

Re: YouTube Channels to Level Up Your Programming Skills

#27

Post by mumblemumble »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #14
VikingCoder wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a guy who apparently has photographic memory. When a new programming language comes out, he buys the book, and reads it, and then he's fluent in that language. It's terrifying to watch. And the guy had no idea that's not how people do it. He saw me fiddling with a new language, and was baffled with what I was doing.

To be honest, it's weird after learning 5-6 programming languages how quickly you can pick up a new language. Grab your variable declarations, inheritance support, static typign, flow control, loop forms, your variable casting, your i/o for files and the standard output for strings and you can learn any language pretty easily. Edit: String concatination if it's not Java-like (because . concatination is a thing)

I'm in a similar boat; I've spent time working with such a wide range of languages that they all feel familiar to me. However, getting comfortable with a new standard library still takes me a year or two.

Re: YouTube Channels to Level Up Your Programming Skills

#28

Post by jasode »

KaiIrwin wrote: post #2

As a self tought software engineer, I have tried learning to code from YouTube videos but I really don't recommend it

>, I have tried learning to code from YouTube videos but I really don't recommend it

Videos can work better for learning visual UI tasks of programming. E.g. learning how to navigate visual IDEs such as Jetbrains, MS Visual Studio, Apple Xcode, Qt Creator, Amazon AWS dashboard, etc.

If the above were all reduced to text-based materials, you'd end up with a bunch of static screen shots which misses the movement of the mouse and the button clicks that showed how the IDE changed from one state to the next.

On the other hand... if you're primarily learning the syntax of a language or studying the Big-O properties of an algorithm, you don't need a talking head on a video to explain it. It's more efficient to just read the text.

Re: YouTube Channels to Level Up Your Programming Skills

#29

Post by cnity »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #14
VikingCoder wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a guy who apparently has photographic memory. When a new programming language comes out, he buys the book, and reads it, and then he's fluent in that language. It's terrifying to watch. And the guy had no idea that's not how people do it. He saw me fiddling with a new language, and was baffled with what I was doing.

To be honest, it's weird after learning 5-6 programming languages how quickly you can pick up a new language. Grab your variable declarations, inheritance support, static typign, flow control, loop forms, your variable casting, your i/o for files and the standard output for strings and you can learn any language pretty easily. Edit: String concatination if it's not Java-like (because . concatination is a thing)

It sounds a little like you're just learning similar languages.
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