Are video tutorials worthed?

Career Advice
1

Hi, fellow campers,
I started freecodecamp on 26 September 2020. I am currently in the Responsive Web Design Certification. I can say that I have done just half of it up till now. I complimented it with a Udemy course by John Smilga.
I have been slow because I watch the course videos (which are too lengthy) along with fcc. So, do you think that I should switch to using only freecodecamp, the Odin project, Mozilla web docs, and W3Schools as resources for studying web development? And also, do campers who get jobs also use video tutorials for studying?
I think that this might also be a doubt for many other campers.

2

everyone can use videotutorials

you need to be careful of walkthroughs do build something, if you just do exactly what the person is doing, you will get a completed project but you will not learn new things. To actually learn something you will need to something of the same kind, without looking at the walkthrough, but using Read-Search-Ask method as much as needed

3

Advice to my younger self:

  • use video tutorials very rarely, because it is a rabbit hole; your retention is very low; you actually copy the other person’s output, but you don’t learn how the person’s decision making was; the return on invest is very low, because you can’t skim video very well; watching 1h of video is passive and simple, reading 1h of docs give you real insights

  • try to mimic real life situations: on the job there is no manual to solve the problem, because every problem lives in its own context and so is very specific; most job-related challenges are not technical, but mental (you are frustrated, stressed, lazy etc.)

  • read docs: docs are written by people who’ve created the thing or are very good at it; most videos are written by amateurs or by “educators”; either the videos are bad or wrong, or reworked many times, so the decision making processes are lost; this creates a false narrative; when I created my 1h React video course, I needed ~20h to create it; but people think it’s easy as 1h; docs teach you to digest text, that’s a real developers real life environment, so better get good at it

2 Likes
4

Thank You Sir for your advice.

5

Thanks mate for giving your valuable advice