Sigh…it's kinda sad how my points were either misunderstood or taken out of context. To prevent this from spiralling into an "arguing for the sake of arguing" debate and also cluttering this thread with info that deviate too far from TS' original intent of opening this thread, this would be my last reply.
That's just sad. The concept of completeness in books, videos or handouts, are just laughable at best. Computer science is way too broad and in-depth for any one source to be "complete".
If books were "about the only way to obtain comprehensive information", then for what reasons do we research into other forms and methods of exchanging information (multimedia)?
With regards to the whole rebuttal you have made in your previous post, the first sentence struck me most. I stated that books are comprehensive, I
did not claim that they are complete. Please do not put words into my mouth. Now, may I direct you to the definition of comprehensive:
"including or dealing with all or nearly all elements or aspects of something." With this definition in mind coupled with the points I made in my previous postings, a good book is a better resource
and closer to comprehensiveness as compared to a podcast, period.
Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words; and an animation - much much more. Could you comprehensively describe a famous work of art, or a famous movie with text and simple diagrams alone (as would be the case in a book)? Even if you tried, it is more than likely that you would have missed many information - or that it is so verbose (which is exceptionally tiring for the reader and writer) that is is no longer a feasible idea.
Even better, EdX courses like CS50 (Introduction to Computer Science 1 by David at Harvard) have forums with which online students may converse with on-campus professors and TAs to clear their doubts in real-time. Technology has just become that much better at bettering our educational progress.
Now, I do not mean to say that he should not ever try to learn to appreciate books - but that, he can do at his leisure. They are separate goals, and we must be clear, which, are we trying to achieve.
Again, taken out of context. You said you are a comp sci major, so I'm going to make a bold guess that you're from NUS.
Yes it's true a picture paints a thousand words, fair enough. But there are pictures and diagrams illustrated in books as well. You went on to state about the video animation to support your stand and that, I cannot fathom. I assume you've at least sat through a lecture in your life to know how most lectures are conducted. A prof standing in front of the LT, explaining the points through static slides and guiding the students along.
Here I am scratching my head trying to make sense which part of the animation were you referring to that is going to aid a student's understanding. The prof's hand movements, or his occasional break to quench his thirst?
The difference between books and university lectures is just that books are all encompassing - all the explanation and pictures are contained in one place. And this is what makes it so easy to refer and reinforce concepts as explained in my previous posts.
Moving on to your point made on university forums, all I can say is
stackoverflow.
Furthermore, it is highly unlikely for anyone to become conceptually confused if they are following an accredited source of information, whether than be a good book, or webcast lectures from a good university. In both cases, we agree that they should be authorities in the pedagogy of Computer Science.
For the last time, most university lectures are meant to be brief. Please reread my previous postings. Not many are born a programming prodigy like you who is able to survive when being thrown into a sea of fragmented programming concepts.
Indeed! And I would like to suggest that, both, good university lectures and well-written books are both credible sources of information - most likely well-designed such that the student is guided to learning to concepts correctly and effectively.
I'm a Computer Science Major.
We're different (both in person, and in learning styles). I rarely find the need to "get my hands dirty coding" to understand and remember a new Computer Science concept. In my case, I believe it is much better to distill out the useful takeaways from the concept - and then implement it around that concept.
At higher level computing, more often than not, one has to modify and apply the concept (as my professor would say, "in a twisted way") to solve computing problems in the real world.
Well it's apparent we have different learning styles, I can't impose my on yours and vice versa. Point taken.
That's just silly. These are university webcasts. Why would there even be a "need" to switch videos halfway through? I can't imagine the professor saying "Students, we'll take a 10 minutes break now. You need to watch this video - the link is on the slide here - as this is part of our course material. If you haven't turned on your laptop, it is a good time to do it now".
If any professor pulls that one of my. I'll be like
.
As for video pausing, it is about the same as doing a bookmark (in my case, I have enough "head" memory to simply memorise the page number I stopped at). If you forgot some syntax (which should really be the least of your concerns) - you'd jump 5 minutes back or so, just as you would flip back a few pages.
Even better, some videos on EdX (such as CS 600.1 by MIT) have "linked" subtitles to the right of the video. If you don't remember something, you can lookup the sentence you want to start from again (like reading a book) and click on it - it helpfully jumps your video to the time that sentence was spoken.
For the final time, please reread my post. Don't hurry into your rebuttal stance. Perhaps I wasn't being specific enough, let me illustrate an example in accordance to the podcast format that you so advocate.
Say you were watching week 2 cs50 and learned something about switches, strings and arrays. And probably after a few hours/days you arrived at week 4 lecture where file I/O was taught. After the lecture, you decided to code a program you always wanted to do - accept a number of user inputs, store them in an array and write them to a file. But dang, you forgot the syntax or how arrays are implemented, so you hurriedly switch back to week 2 video and try to locate the specific part of the video in which array was discussed.
This was the video switching I was referring to, not the mumbo jumbo which you were trying to put across in the quote above. And this is also where video pales in comparison to the appendix of books when it comes to referencing which makes up the bulk of learning.
For someone of your calibre who is able to understand and fully grasp concepts in one sitting, you might not be able to comprehend the possibility and the need to video switch for the revisiting of concepts taught but please try to understand the plight most of us normal intellects have to partake during our programming journey.
With that, I end this WOT. Have a good day.
