Sometimes a few words are worth a 1,000 pictures

Like many, I really like the ongoing trend of providing developer-related information in the form of videos.

I suppose I'd better … although I don't know the exact count, the number of "How Do I Videos for Devices" and On-Demand Webcasts I've made total in excess of 100 – BUT, I'm a bit bothered by what appears to be a trend of delivering developer-related content in only video form.

I recently needed to ramp up quickly on a particular technology and I did what I always do in such a circumstance; I tried to locate a few pieces of good content that would give me a solid foundation in the technology so I could then start writing programs to experiment with the technology's ins-and-outs.

My search for content didn't quite go as I hoped. My problem was not that I couldn't find any content on the subject; I found quite a lot of content. The problem was that virtually all of that content was videos. There were a few papers available but they tended to focus on high-level topics and generalities; not really much I could use to start actually working with the technology.

In my personal experience, I find videos useful for getting information on how to perform a particular task but I find them to be of limited value when trying to build up an overall picture of the technology. I also find that in some cases videos slow down the learning process. In the case of using papers, one can read just particular sections of interest, quickly skip past topics not of interest, and easily refer back and forth between multiple papers; all things not easily done with videos.

So all of you content producers, content managers, and decision makers out there … please keep written-content coming.

Written content and videos are fantastic compliments to one another … they're not replacements.