>>>>> "Bert" == Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> writes:

Bert> Many younger folks prefer videos to written documentation.

I don't know that you need to bring age into this. :)

What I've learned after decades of being a corporate trainer is
that people learn from three modes:

concepts: background descriptions, terminology, first principles,
building blocks

structure: fill-in-the-blank patterns, completing a portion of
the task, or the entire task

examples: working through a single specific task from front to back

People prefer different things, and at different times, for different tasks.

Screencasts are great *examples*, but they're horrible structure
or concepts.

We really need all three.  One's not *better* than the other... it just comes
at it from a different angle.

Aside: if you look at Learning Perl, you'll see that we deliberately mix up
all three... sometimes a topic is introduced "concept-first", sometimes
"structure-first", sometimes "example-first".  And it works really well.

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion