This is the perfect combination of ebook and video for me, and I didn't know Manning was doing this. Some minor feedback:
- I wish the transcript text size could be increased without affecting the rest of the UI (which seems fine). Maybe it can and I missed it, or I need to be logged in?
- I see “pause on try its” in the page options (it's checked and disabled) but couldn't find any videos that use this. This feature sounds like it would greatly enhance the learning experience and it should be part of all videos. I learn a lot more when actively trying things than when passively watching and reading, and few online courses combine video and text transcripts with hands-on opportunities well.
I just bought Algorithms in Motion on the back of this experience, though, (plus a couple of books I'd been considering) and am looking forward to going through the whole course.
> - I wish the transcript text size could be increased without affecting the rest of the UI (which seems fine). Maybe it can and I missed it, or I need to be logged in?
Totally agreed we need this. I've passed this feedback onto the developers (I'm in editorial here).
> - I see “pause on try its” in the page options (it's checked and disabled) but couldn't find any videos that use this. This feature sounds like it would greatly enhance the learning experience and it should be part of all videos. I learn a lot more when actively trying things than when passively watching and reading, and few online courses combine video and text transcripts with hands-on opportunities well.
Yep, we're still experimenting with this feature. I think you'll see us using it much, much more in future content.
As a customer, I've been seeing the changes they've been doing over the years, and absolutely love the work they've done. At every stage, you can see the attention and care to simple things that make the Manning site a pleasure and the experience better and better. Tell them to keep up the good work.
It's in-house, yes. Interestingly, the original code base was designed to tie book text to audio-book readings, which we use in our liveBook platform. There's various third-party libraries in play for some of it, but other than that we've built it all in-house.
I agree that people can read at 200+ wpm while most people only talk at ~100 wpm. However, some programming presentations are visually intensive with demonstrations of interactive features. That would be videos such as showing how an IDE works (debugging tips and tricks), CSS transforms, GUI workflow (e.g. navigate AWS admin screens to set up security, auto-scaling, etc). For example, I see that the landing page has severgal Google I/O keynotes and those are always heavy with demos.
But yes, for presentations of static text such as explaining the new syntax for C++11, a "talking head" reading the slides may not add much value and just slow you down.
As for transcripts... Since many videos seem to come from YouTube, it may be possible to download the auto-generated captions.[1] (I don't have a YouTube account so I have no idea how well this works.) I noticed one presentation where a speaker was talking about "Qt" framework but the Youtube's speech recognition auto-captioned it as "cute". I don't know if mistranslation is a rare and minor annoyance or if it makes the transcripts unusable.
To downvoters: please let me know what I wrote that didn't add positive contribution to this discussion.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=download+youtube+captions&oq...
I wouldn't bother with the automatically generated ones, though. They are not good enough. (Whenever there are real captions, I turn them on to be able to speed up the video beyond the point where I can no longer hear what people say. That's great!)
How can you tell if the captions are real vs auto-generated? Do you mean "real" as in subtitles that are burned into the video source instead of being dynamically overlaid?
Ok, I never noticed that. I just read the captions and assumed obvious misspellings were auto-generated.
For example in this video[1], the caption text is "L1D cache misses" but he's actually saying "L1-dcache misses". (The Linux terminal screen he's showing does display "L1-dcache".) Even though that video is not labeled as "auto-generated", I assumed it was because of the bad caption. Based on your info, I guess CppCon uses humans like Mechanical Turk or other non-domain typists to manually add the captions.
In college, I met a deaf guy who always had two women accompany him to lectures; one of them would repeat everything into a mouth-covering microphone to generate an automatic transcription and the other went over it to correct obvious errors. They generated a lot of nonsense, especially when the German professor was using some English loanwords for CS concepts. I was always amazed that the deaf guy still somehow managed to learn something from these garbled transcriptions.
Yes, I get the point that many books have gratuitous screen shots to pad the page count. But that's a separate issue from the idea that some videos don't translate well to transcripts.
>had text descriptions for every element, you just need to read them.
Sure, I understand the value of reading. However, sometimes a presenter showing a live demo will wiggle the mouse cursor around certain options on the screen to emphasize particular things or clarify what may be confusing with a list of check boxes. ("You want to click this; you don't want to click that.") Or maybe demonstrate clicking on a setting and then immediately show the system dashboard statistics changing in realtime as a response. That combination of dynamic "spatial"+"time" to convey technical information is the value of live demos over reading man pages.
The videos are not replacements for concise reference texts but a supplementary teaching tool.
Here's an example of a video demonstrating high interaction with tools that would be very cumbersome to put into text:
https://youtu.be/Wuy_Pm3KaV8?t=20m00s
Lots of of mouse of movement to guide where the eye should look. Lots of scrolling and zooming. Voice annotation that's synchronized with the screen data that's constantly changing. It wouldn't translate well to text. Even if one manually created an accurate text transcript of that talk, all the missing visual cues would inhibit learning how to "drive" the tool like a car. Transcripts are only a reasonable substitute for some types of tech talks.
This is a brilliant idea, I'm going to file my patent application now.
I might be playing through a video really fast, but suddenly need to repeat something so hit backspace to drop to normal speed, a press or two of left arrow to jump back (~5 secs each), then tap ] a few times to speed up again. Then if there's an interesting chart or graph shown, just f to toggle full screen, s for screenshot if you like.
Being able to navigate and control linear media with simple keyboard shortcuts feels liberating in a similar way to the first time you grok a powerful edit with just a few keystrokes in Vim or Emacs (except you're just consuming media of course).
The mind just beees to get used to the voice and pitch of the speaker
– Eduards