The best comparison is that things like the Language, platform, and library documentation is an animal encyclopedia, your average programming book is a annotated reference to that encyclopedia, and thenewboston is one of those toys where you spin the arrow and it tells you what sound farm animals make.
Thank You BC for the much needed laugh on a 12 hr shift
Also Thanks Cameron for the suggestion. I have used Youtube for other how to videos such as guitar techniques for playing my Ibanez electric for certain music that has you performing some tricky finger work etc, as well as being able to see the insides of my oil furnace pump motor assy before servicing it to know what parts and tools are needed etc which allowed me to fix my own furnace this winter for $7 in parts. Haven't used it for looking at programming yet, but will look at the videos thenewboston has.
Back when I learned programming in the early 1980s with Basic with the TRS-80 Model 1 with 16k RAM, it was all hands on by learning it out of a book that came with the computer which may have been called TRS Basic with an Hour Glass like symbol for Tandy. All the cool programs to really learn from were by taking 1 or 2 hours to carefully type in a program out of the TRS-80 Magazine called the 80 Micro which was a Monthly magazine with all sorts of programs printed in it that you could type manually into your computer and save to Cassette tape or if your lucky a single sided 5.25" floppy disk. Some were games, others were how to control sprites on the display etc for a starburst effect etc. Back in those days I learned quickly to debug code when either I messed up typing it in or there was a typo in the magazine and you had to find the typo which was sometimes like Wheres Waldo trying to find a missing ( : or ; ) when on a single line you can have multiple instructions such as [ 5 For N=1 to 255:?chr$(N);" = ";N:Next N ] and the ? was a faster shorthand for PRINT and when you performed LIST to see the code the ? would be PRINT which was a faster programming method for all the many PRINT instructions.
Some people learn by watching a video etc which would be similar to a teacher who talks and doesnt take questions and others learn by the book reading and then typing the code in and watching the program either run correctly, run with unintended results, or fail to run or compile depending on if its a true language that needs to be compiled or a scripting language that would simply state an error at say Line 14.
