I don't know why the need to pooh pooh videos in general though. They have their place and are definitely better than a manual for certain things. Sometimes it's just much easier to get how to do something when you see someone else doing it on screen. Manuals can be confusing and even counterproductive if they're not written well. There's nothing worse than reading something in a manual that is ambiguous or creates more questions than it answers. There's an art to writing manuals that I think most software developers just don't have. And a technical manual is going to look far more useful to a technically minded person than a newbie. People forget how confusing a brand new piece (or type) of software is to a complete beginner. Technically minded people are usually pretty bad at understanding what a newbie does and doesn't know, and they make erroneous assumptions about the reader's level of knowledge which causes confusion and frustration. Video instructors sometimes do the same thing, but having the visual demonstration on screen makes all the difference.
Also, manuals are not often organized that well and present far more information to the beginner than they need. This is especially true with "reference" manuals the aim of which is to be as complete as possible. They're not written in a way which is conducive to learning, especially when the new user just wants to get up and running to the point where they can figure out the rest on their own. When reading a manual, you have to be good at separating the stuff that's relevant to you from the stuff that's superfluous to a beginner. I recall learning how to program in C from a book that turned out in later chapters to be great, but man were the first few chapters a confusing PITA to read, unbelievable for a book which claims you don't need prior knowledge. They contain stuff like this:
"When appearing in an expression, char and short, both signed and unsigned, are automatically converted to int or, if necessary, to unsigned int. (If short is the same size as int, unsigned short is larger than int; in that case, unsigned short is converted to unsigned int.) Under K&R C, but not under current C, float is automatically converted to double. Because they are conversions to larger types, they are called promotions."
As a beginner, you're left wondering how much of this stuff you really need to know now and how much you should come back to later. I find manuals to be full of unnecessarily confusing stuff like this, and in many cases videos are the best way to go for a beginner.