>Oh yes, the MCSE books with screenshots of wizards.
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:
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.
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.