If anything, a good book (or video course) will be a high-density, concentrated pill of everything you need to know about the subject to know what everything is and how it interacts. By comparison, reading blog posts and random YouTube videos is more akin to "grazing" - sure you can learn, but not as fast and you'll be missing context until the lightbulb goes off.
I think what they are getting at is if you want to actually learn some deep fundamental knowledge on a topic, its still going to be best found in a book today over a youtube video or a medium post. I agree with this. There is a lot of noise on the internet, and all of it is optimized for short form consumption that leaves out a lot of detail. Relevant blog posts you struggle to find due to SEO spam can't compare to a couple hundred page encyclopediac handbook on a given topic. If you want to change your oil maybe you can get by with a youtube video, but if you want to one day cultivate actual expertise you better buy that haynes manual that covers every little system in your car in one place you can easily reference that isn't prone to link rot. You are right that its hard to get good books for certain communities, but the internet comes in handy here, and plenty of good books are available freely online through means of varying legitimacy. If you want to really get a handle on physics, maybe finding a PDF of a good textbook in addition to those youtube videos would go further.
Call me old school but after watching numerous people try and fail to learn online with courses and especially YouTube videos, I'm pretty convinced that to learn ideally people need to read textbooks.
This isn't a question of learning styles - and I do believe that online courses and videos are valuable supplementary materials. But none of them compare in richness and direction to a well written and organized book.
Books are more dense, more random-access, and you can go through them at your own pace. They're also easier to understand (assuming literacy) and less disruptive to people around the user.
It can be nice to have videos going over difficult parts of a book--working through my graph theory textbook would be pretty obnoxious without going to lecture--but I would really only use them as supplementary material, not the main material.
I would add for practical skills (including some research!) videos and podcasts seem to offer more feedback. Nobody in a book ever tells me what a flange or spline or baulk ring actually is, nobody in a video does either, but in the latter I get to see it and make my own, usually fit-for-current-purpose, inferences.
Closer personal example: I spent weeks trying to bully a supervised machine learning approach into a reinforcement learning one, because the 800-page reference book I used (that claims to cover all machine learning, and is well regarded!) in no way acknowledges the existence of this sub field. For whatever reason, and across multiple fields, I've never found static text to be good at "here's what you should be looking for", and I don't think it's reasonable to discount that knowledge as being valuable.
I find that articles and blogs are good for questions, books are good for answers - or at least an attempt at that answer.
Sometimes you'll find an article that is as good as a book but other times I read a book proceeding an article and then wish the author would have started by reading some books themselves.
I find other long form content like podcasts or filmed presentations can sometimes hit that quality mark of books too.
Articles / tweets are good for learning the name of a concept I've never heard of.
Books / podcasts / YouTube are a good way to deep dive on the actual concept itself.
It's at least different to mine. I generally learn much better from reading than watching a video, instructor, etc. I also generally learn better through broader reading than doing exercises and such
It’s not that books are better than YouTube, in many cases (like visualizing math) books are much worse than video, but for a lot of topics books are the only source that goes in depth on a topic. It won’t necessarily be the case a hundred years from now, but right now if you want to study a topic that had been around for more than 30 years you’ll probably have to invest time in books. And the part that isn’t mentioned here is that most of those books are out of print so you will need to dig through libraries and maybe even use the Inter-library loan system.
I think books will give you deeper knowledge that may span the entire subject while blogs will create new holes in your knowledge that you will patch via slow google searches. Books will also be more consistently structured for you to get value from reading them. While many books were written explicitly to sell copies the bar is much higher than blog posts.
Online resources are often shallow in content. I prefer to deep dive into a topic and truly learn it inside and out by reading a good book. Blogs and tutorials don't give you that deep insight.
This resonates w/me. When I read a book, I tend to remember at least something from it for years or even decades. As for blog posts or YouTube videos, most of them I forget by the next day. They seem to carry lots and lots of information, but give very little knowledge.
> Why books over blogs, videos or talk? I'd actually say books on the side of those. Shorter formats tend to skim the surface compared to a book, for any topic.
There's more to it than that: Books are random access devices. You can skim portions, or re-read potions in great depth, and when you suddenly realize you aren't understanding something it's typically easier to jump back to the place where you now realize you had lost your way. Videos and podcasts lack the necessary affordances for deep understanding.
Blog posts can be deep too, but by their nature are typically so only for single topics. This can be good or bad, though for the point the author was making, yes, not helpful. But I don't dismiss them at all.
> Books are in-depth, and well-organized knowledge. ...
Undergraduate here, and I tend to agree.
I used to learn a lot of material online using all the sites, blog posts, videos, visualizations, etc I could find... But as time has gone on Ive realized that most flashy materials, are less helpful that just spending some time with a single good book on a topic.
This misses a big part of why books and lectures are much more effective than the author presents. In books and lectures a practitioner is offering you shortcuts and advice to avoid pitfalls and accelerate your learning in a polished well thought out way (if the author/instructor is good - big if). Sure, not everyone retains them. But for those who do they can practice by doing without banging their head against the wall as much.
My experience is that those who can pay attention to a book/lecture and do plenty of practice by doing are the fastest learners.
> it's unhelpful to throw book titles at a person without any context or guidance
Here's one reason it's unhelpful; After 4 or 5 people list a bunch of books, you now have a long list of books, and no way to know which to start with, unless there is a lot of overlap - you could just as well google/search amazon and look at ratings, which would give you far better results.
Furthermore, many people tend not to read multiple math books on the same subject, so they just recommend what they know w/o having any knowledge of how that book fares against other suggestions.
If they expand on either their own credentials, and reading on the matter, so you have the context of their knowledge; or give reasons why that book is good, this gives a better basis for comparison.
As an aside; I like the coursera structure of following video lectures with content summaries of what was covered in the video. The advantage is 1) quick reference of material without having to search through a video; 2) if you already understand the topic, you can often just read the summary, and skip the video if you think you already know the material.
Another aside; one problem with books versus videos is often books are long compendia of a field, where as videos are shorter. if you already know topic A and want to learn B, then there may already be a video on topic B, where as a book might cover B in some chapter. For these cases, it might be good to discuss individual chapters/sections of book, but that assumes you can ready them somewhat independently given prior knowledge.
for me books aren't primary source of learning. I just want them, read them whenever confused and my materials I'm following aren't answering my questions or clearing me about concepts. I primarily use videos and blogs.
This seems to be a trend in general. Books or instructional videos are usually either made for people who are assumed to know basically nothing, or people who can be assumed to already know everything. I find it makes self guided learning very difficult in almost any field
Hmm, I see it somewhat oppositely. I find that most books are bloated and spend most pages regurgitating information I already know, where blog posts tend to present only the novel information, using hyperlinks to link to information required to understand the given post.
If I know nothing about a topic I find books to be really valuable, but for topics I'm already knowledgeable on, they are terribly inefficient.
No, books are way better than reading blogs and forums. They keep a context and enforces the same style through the whole book which I find very useful
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