What are the best programming-related screencasts?

Question

Screencasts can be extremely educational and informative. If well produced, IMHO they can be very effective learning tools for developers, just short of pairing with an experienced developer. They can also be a waste of time.

In the same light as this question, what have been the best programming-related screencasts you've seen?

What did you like or dislike about them?

• Aspects of the production
  • Script/Dialogue
  • Audio
  • Video
• Freely available?
• Misc (things like using KeyCastr or similar to show keyboard shortcuts)

I hope the responses will help us come to something of a consensus about what works and what doesn't.

Answer 1

I like DnRTV (http://dnrtv.com/). AV Quality are good and the hosts are entertaining. Most are capped at about 1 hour. Good informational content.

Answer 2

Eclipse-Live is a good resource for anything eclipse related.

This one is a demo of an eclipse-plugin called Cola (admittedly bad name) that allows realtime code editing by multiple developers. For being what looks like a single-take, it is of pretty good production quality. It looks like they used a lot of the tools available in ScreenFlow to zoom and also display the presenter speaking alongside the screencast.

It's got a great wow factor and got me pretty excited about the tool right away.

Answer 3

Try are not free, but the quality is good at www.learnvisualstudio.net

Answer 4

I'm a big fan of the dimecasts.net screencasts. They try to keep them within 10 minutes and manage to show you the concepts and the code in that amount of time. This is a great way to get introduced to new ideas in some amount of depth.

As far as very in-depth screencasts go, I've found the summerofnhibernate.com screencasts to invaluable. It's a series of in-depth screen casts on one topic - NHibernate. By the time you finish this series of screencasts you'll know quite a bit about the topic.

Answer 5

I've always found Ryan Bates railscasts really good. The production has improved over time and they are now very slick. They deal exclusively with Ruby on Rails, as the name suggests, at an intermediate level.

Ryan knows his subject very well and always follows "Best Practice".

Answer 6

I really enjoyed the Peepcode episodes that I've seen.

Unlike the previously mentioned Railscasts they're commercial (with bulk discounts), but they're well scripted and narrated and the picture quality is awesome. Their niche is centered around Ruby and Rails development, but they do that well. Each video comes with a preview and some of the more complex topics comes in several episodes. They've also gone back and updated previous ones to reflect changes in their topic matter.

Answer 7

Pluralsight now offers Free Guest passes. The On-Demand! library has recently relaunched with new features, subscription plans and content - definitely worth checking out.

Answer 8

SoftDevTube.com has catalogued and classified more than 1500 software development related screencasts and videos

Answer 9

You can also check out HighOnCoding videos. All of them are FREE and in HD quality:

http://www.highoncoding.com/Categories/22_Videos.aspx

Answer 10

http://tekpub.com/ appears to be another subscription-based site.

Answer 11

FiveMinuteRuby is a site where I'm experimenting with screencasts that are under 5 minutes, that will try to focus mostly on fundamentals (and some tips/tricks here and there).

So many screencasts are long-winded that it might be a breath of fresh air to produce videos that get straight to the point.