Online D course on coursera/udacity/etc?

Jacob Carlborg doob at me.com
Wed Mar 20 00:34:47 PDT 2013


On 2013-03-19 20:40, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> I agree that doing a full-scale online video course for D is probably
> not a good idea at the moment.
>
> However, that does not preclude having a text-based course, which is
> much easier to produce and keep up-to-date. Although video is nice to
> have, I don't see it as essential. In fact, I tend to avoid video
> courses, because (1) it takes a lot of time to watch the videos (reading
> is much more efficient); (2) it's difficult to go through a video
> piecemeal (you lose the train of thought of the speaker), whereas you
> can pause while reading whenever you like and resume later; (3) reading
> permits highly-nonlinear consumption of materials: you can put the
> current page on hold, click on a link to more details about something
> you didn't quite understand, read that first, then come back, etc.. (4)
> Written material is searchable.
>
> I contend that a text-based course is *not* the same as documentation.
> Documentation is intended for reference: to look up something when you
> already know what you're looking for. A *course*, OTOH, is for learning:
> you need some guidance to grasp the basic principles and concepts before
> the documentation is useful to you. Sorta like a tutorial, but more
> thorough, and with interspersed activities like quizzes, small
> programming projects, etc..
>
> Depending on how you structure it, you can do a lot without needing to
> shoot/maintain videos.

I really like Railscasts in the Ruby on Rails world. But these are 
screen casts with tips and tricks for when you already know Rails. These 
casts are around 10-15 min so the length is never a problem. It's a 
great way to find out new things/plugins in the Rails world.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg


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