Books or video tutorial: the best way to learn coding?

I think the answer is &quot;yes&quot;. In other words, <i>both</i>.<p>I&#x27;m only speaking for myself here, when I say the following things... for me, I&#x27;m my own worst enemy when it comes to learning.<p>This happens first and foremost by getting <i>distracted</i> with social media (Facebook, Twitter, HN).<p>To quote Cal Newport (an author who speaks on this <i>very thing</i>) from his book Deep Work. &quot;To learn hard things quickly you must focus intensely without distraction.&quot;*<p>So let&#x27;s say you&#x27;re not aiming to be quick about learning to code, necessarily. It still follows that not being distracted is key.<p>I think covering both books and video helps you get information from multiple inputs, and covers different learning styles. ANYTHING to get the concepts cemented in your head.<p>Most of all, do what you can to learn in an environment where you&#x27;re not bombarded by many things designed to distract you.<p>I recommend this book. I&#x27;m in the process of reading it now, myself. I feel like he&#x27;s talking directly to me, and that I could have been MUCH more effective in both learning and work, had I discovered this MUCH sooner.<p>Good luck. I&#x27;d be curious to hear how you&#x27;re making progress on your learning journey.<p>*Newport, C. (Grand Central, 2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World [Kindle version, page 36]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Both actually.<p>Speaking for myself... I start with video. It is easier to find, easier to follow and easier to implement. Now when you finish with video course, search for &quot;best&quot; or &quot;amazing&quot; book for that particular language or framework.<p>Because of video course introduction, most part of the book will be like &quot;seen somewhere&quot; or &quot;read somewhere&quot;. so the reading of book becomes tolerable and more understanding.<p>Bottom line, (I believe ) Video courses are never enough and books are long and difficult. So, start with video course and finish it with a book.<p>IMP point : practice while going through the whole process.

I&#x27;m more of the type to prefer textual content. A lot easier to scan through and process at your own pace than video content that you naturally are expected to perceive in a time-based manner.

Depends on what I&#x27;m trying to learn. If it&#x27;s a programming language, or something math-heavy, I prefer books. If it&#x27;s GUI programming, I prefer videos. I tried learning Android programming from their official documentation, and felt lost with all those hyperlinks that made a horrible directed multicyclic graph. I did not consider books for this because it&#x27;s a fast-moving target. I learnt python entirely from their official documentation.

It really depends on the person. Personally I like official tutorial webpages and videos for learning the basics, and books for gaining a deeper context or best practices.

When I need to learn a new language I tend to buy a book for the first few chapters so I can learn the basics of the language(variables, control structures, etc). Then I&#x27;ll subscribe to whatever the most popular video site is pick a project I want to implement and start working on it and when I need to know how to do something look for a video on it and read the transcription since I don&#x27;t actually like watching the videos.

When trying to learn programming for the first time, find a book that has lots of exercises. I used an earlier edition of <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;openbookproject.net&#x2F;thinkcs&#x2F;python&#x2F;english3e&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;openbookproject.net&#x2F;thinkcs&#x2F;python&#x2F;english3e&#x2F;</a>, but I&#x27;ve heard that people like &quot;learn python&#x2F;java&#x2F;ruby&#x2F;... the hard way&quot;.

As others have said, both have their place for me.<p>I like videos that give me a conceptual overview, or tell me the thinking behind why they coded something in a certain way. For details and reference I use books (unless it&#x27;s a fast-changing technology, in which case the language&#x2F;tool&#x27;s docs are where I go), or I need a deeper dive on something that&#x27;s not just code.

Videos are a good starting point. But both books and videos are bad since most stuff is dated. Tech keeps getting updated and you are stuck with the version you &quot;studied&quot;. So, IMO, get started with videos, learn using books&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;stackoverflow etc. but keep revisiting so that you are really on top of things.

To me, books are a great high-bandwidth way to absorb the full breadth of the topic. Videos are more linear, and slower. But videos can help if you lack motivation or focus to read books.<p>But either way, to internalize the learnings requires doing many coding exercises.

Videos can be better for high level content, but books and blogs are better for code. I say can because producing high quality programming related videos is rare from what I&#x27;ve seen (do we need something like markdown for videos?).

Books can be a pretty lonely way to learn technical material. Videos, much less so but I find it can take a bit longer to grasp video content because you always have to be engaged since it is not easily scannable.

I prefer books - or really, just plain old tutorials on the web. I created <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;enlight.ml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;enlight.ml</a> to do just that. Check it out! :)

Text hands down. We can easily scan and skip parts that we do not need. Videos are such a drain on time and are boring. Its hard to go back and forth.

Brute Force