Could YouTube Videos Be Slowing Down Your Dev Career?

The best way to learn a new programming language or framework is to learn it completely on your first time. What I mean is that rather than learning it in bits by different tutors, you should get a series of tutorials (a course) from one tutor. This is where YouTube comes in picture. Often, we go to YouTube to search for crash courses. while some of these are good, most of them are often incomplete. By this, you may never completely learn a stack.

Take for example learning React. I may choose to go to YouTube to learn React. I’ll probably search for “react for beginners” initially. After that I realize there’s more than just the ‘beginners’ tutorial. I’ll then search for “routes in react” and then “react hooks” and so on. In the end, I shall have learnt much of react but maybe not entirely. On the other hand, what if I just looked for a complete React course and learnt it step by step from beginner to pro? I shall have saved time and learnt all of React at once. The idea is opting for complete courses rather than short tutorials that only teach some section of the whole thing.

It is undoubtedly true that YouTube has a lot of video playlists that make up tutorials. But sadly, it also has the incomplete videos and most of the times we fall for these and we never finish to learn one language or framework or any kind of tech for that matter.
YouTube can be the best place to learn when you find a concise playlist that covers every aspect of what you want to learn or is recommended by several developers. Moreover, when you need clarification for something that you didn’t understand in the courses or there is a new feature that has been added, then YouTube is the best reference (and also the documentation). The point I’m driving home is that it’s imperative that we go for full courses and refrain from incomplete videos.