Well, speaking from personal experience, I would say yes. I can say that the reasons as for why could be: 1. Reading slows you down giving your brain more time to "catch up". 2. Many books will give you hint/tips very often, some will go as far as explaining how it works under the hood. 3. Publishing a books is harder than making a video, as literally anyone can publish a video, but not everyone can publish a book, thus books on average will have a lot more effort put into them. 4. Books also tend to have a glossary explaining each concept in detail, think of it as a wikipedia of sorts. Books are an all in one type of deal. 5. You are forced to write down the code rather than simply copy/pasting it, allowing you to make mistakes and learn from them. 6. Programming is all about reading and understand the code, books help you train exactly that. 7. And finally but not less important, you don't need internet access. I can say that in the few days that I have been reading the book that I have started to subconciously "compile" the code in my brain. By that I mean that if I see this: printf("This is just %c placeholder \nnumber: %d", 'a', 4); I automatically understand it as: This is just a placeholder number: 4 I also installed an IDE (integrated development enviroment) on my phone so I can practice on the go, it is called C4droid and I highly recommend it. It is a paid app but worth every cent. If you want to go with desktop, get Code::Blocks, it is multiplatform and it isn't Microsoft's Visual Studio.