The approach taken in the videos is great because it starts off with implementing your own simplified version of Redux and builds on that. There are no "magic" steps, this makes it much easier to develop an understanding of how it works.
Following the official redux tutorials left me and my boss independently frustrated and turned off by the app.js description. We had both given up on redux until I followed this tutorial and it explained how simple and elegant the way components received properties from the redux state in th connect call.
Without this tutorial we wouldn't be experiencing the ease and joy redux can bring to large react apps (We're currently porting a large messy Angular app to react piece by piece by replacing just leafs of the app at a time)
I was actually surprised when i started, because it starts with describing flux and how it works (and compares it to a more traditional MVC arch). Then it just slowly removes pieces until you get to a redux system.
The approach taken in the videos is great because it starts off with implementing your own simplified version of Redux and builds on that. There are no "magic" steps, this makes it much easier to develop an understanding of how it works.