Tutorial section flooded by videos

Making video tutorials instead of text is becoming a serious trend, i hate that, video tutorials are dumb, but that's not place and time to discuss that... What i want to know is, there is any good soul that converted those video tutorials to text? Or made text tutorials for beginners?

Thanks in advance.

 

Just out of curiosity - why do you find video tutorials to be "dumb"? As someone who makes them, I would like to know how they can be improved upon.

Also, we know that some people favor text tutorials - which is why we are working to convert each and every one of our tutorials to text - so there will be a text tutorial to accompany each video tutorial from our website. Is this something that would be even better than just text or just video - in your opinion?

To answer your question, look up catlike coding. There are some excellent text tutorials there for beginners and advanced users.

 

Thanks for the answer.

"why do you find video tutorials to be "dumb"?"
1) Impossible to divide them in sections, on a text tutorial i can "jump" lines of text that don't show things of my interest, on video tutorials i have to go through the entire thing or i might lose something important
2) Nobody speaks as fast as i can read, a 20min video teaches me as much as a 5min reading at best
3) The learning flow is different, if you pause a video tutorial and go try what you were learning, it's is impossible to rapidly check things you forgot, or if you're forgetting something at all, on a text tutorial this is really easy, i can even divide the screen to test things while i read
4) English isn't my native language, i can read almost as well as i can read my native language, but i have a lot of difficulty hearing it, that gets worse due to the high accent variety(i understand that this is MY limitation, and a lot of non-native English speakers may have the opposite limitation)
5) It feels like I'm watching some of these vlogs(i know, not a real argument there hehehe)

"Is this something that would be even better than just text or just video - in your opinion?"
Of course, most people prefer video tutorials, otherwise they wouldn't be so popular, appealing to both "worlds" is a good measure, maybe it's even easier to do the opposite, creating a video of a existent text seems like a good approach.

 

I'm not a fan of video tutorials either (hard to skip around to different sections) but they are pretty popular with other people.

It's not a free tutorial, but if you want some excellent text explanations you should check out Unity in Action!

 

Thats a silly thing to say, and really discredits you.

CatLikeCoding has great text based tutorials with new ones monthly. You can also support him on Patreon.

 

@LaneFox
Sorry, didn't intended to be rude, just a bad word choice, I'm not offending those that like the format, or those that make it, it's dumb for me, on the sense that it's not good for my workflow and "dumbfies" my learning curve

 

Check out my signature for Codey's Lab. (Interactive tutorials) It's a tutorial that runs directly inside the Editor.

 

I won't agree that video tutorials are "dumb" but I do prefer some tutorials in text rather than video. It depends on the tutorial really. If it's strictly a coding tutorial, text works better for me (or failing that, video with downloadable example code so I'm not trying to follow along typing). For tutorials that teach or demonstrate more graphical things (like use of the editor, level/character design, 3D modeling, etc) I prefer video. If there were no video tutorials explaining the Unity editor, I would have spent weeks clicking around and exploring through trial and error before I figured it out. Going outside Unity (but to a tool a lot of us probably use), if there were no video tutorials for Blender I would have never figured it out at all.

 

It is hard to take a computer to bed with you. Books and paper text are good

 

One thing videos accomplish is preventing people from copying and pasting code. So I think it is one of those things people will always be frustrated with - but from a learning standpoint this is a major pitfall with text tutorials.

 

Why do a tutorial if all are just going to copy-paste the code?

Also, the Unity Learn Tutorials post the scripts covered in that lesson in code format below the videos.

 

I believe the world needs something in between: An interactive tutorial that will maximize speed in learning the code and using it in your own projects.

Videos are great are demonstrating possibilities, but poor at providing retention.
Text is great for its ease of use, but poor at demonstrating actual results.

The ideal tutorial would be interactive and should have these features:

- See the goal that the code should produce
- Allow the user to attempt to produce the code himself first
- See the results of the code immediately
- Have the possibility to experiment with the code and see its results
- Be organized and allow navigation to any lesson in the tutorial
- Provide quizzes that test understanding of the code
- Allow discussion about that code
- Go from start (blank scene) to a final game (that could be published)


Imagine the future 100+ years, how do you think they will learn programming then?

What is stopping us from doing that now?


At least if video tutorial authors could provide a transcription of their code, that would satisfy the OPs request.

But the problem is that most video tutorials are not scripted and are not well organized. It's line of thought which ends up seeing a guy make a bunch of small mistakes and have many pauses and a random flow of events.

Videos don't make good text, and text doesn't necessarily make a good video.

 

The best type of tutorial (video, text, or something in between) will be forever debated because each of these appeals to different people - and some people can learn from either of the three. The way people learn is definitely an interesting topic of research, yet futile to an extent. Like most things, it is impossible to please everyone.

 

A huge factor is a person's interest level. If you want to learn something then just sit down, read/watch then execute and apply the lesson. You wouldn't learn any less from a video than you would from a book by the same author on the same topic unless you had a biased attitude or interest toward the form of the material.

 

@renaissanceCoder1

It is only futile if we do nothing about it. If we try new ways to provide training, we will provide training models that will improve the current state of learning. Not every attempt will be successful, but that doesn't make the effort futile.

It is certainly true that we have multiple learning needs and we can never please everyone, and for that reason every tutorial should have a target audience in mind. However, there is always room for improvement that would help everybody. We have new technology in this world that wasn't common 10 years ago. We need to use that new tech to the greatest advantage.

BTW: Thank you for your great organization in your video series here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity3d-zero-to-hero-tutorials.336361/

Lack of organization is one of the biggest problems with video tutorials, and you have done well to solve that.

 

Well put.

 

IIRC, you can harvest the YouTube "Subtitles" for any of our videos and you'll get a reasonable facsimile of a transcript.

We do favour video lessons for several reasons - They are different from our written documentation (Manual, Blogs, etc.), They are popular, They show instead of tell. They do have some drawbacks, admittedly - They are harder to maintain, They are hard to pause and experiment with, They are hard to index and access, They frustrate a certain demographic of our users.

We are creating more text documents (see the most recent graphics lesson), but we are also trying to increase the depth of our manual's written documentation (see the recent update to shaders and materials) and, as we move forward, we may find that our written material will be used more to enhance the manual rather than the learn lessons... we'll see.

 

True, but they also make it harder to read the code at your own pace unless you follow along typing usually with some pretty heavy use of the pause button. For me personally, being able to read the code at my own pace helps me learn more than just typing what I see on the screen (which doesn't teach me much more than copy/pasting the code would). Being able to do that without having to tab back and forth between a media player and an editor, pausing and unpausing video every few seconds, etc. is a big plus.