I'm surprised no one has mentioned the David Parnas papers: "On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules" is an all-time classic [1]. Much more philosophical than most of the suggestions here so far, but this paper really drove home to me the importance of abstraction in software design. (Also covered in the Morning Paper [2].)
An excellent textbook that teaches Parnas' approach is "Software
Engineering: Planning for Change" by David Alex Lamb. The
chapter Detailed Design is especially pertinent to this thread. The book is from 1988. I once wrote the author
to ask if there would be another edition. He replied, "publishers aren't interested because it isn't object oriented". In fact, its lessons are as relevant to object-oriented programs as any others.
Stanford student here – not taking the class (took it a couple of years ago), but have many friends who are. According to them, there's roughly 700 students currently enrolled in the course.
I haven't experienced the buffering issues you describe, but I've definitely seen the resizing issues from leaving fullscreen (screenshot here): http://cl.ly/2y3F0B3V0X09013U0710. I've noticed this doesn't happen after full-screen, however; there's resizing issues anytime you toggle between different video sizes.
I should point out that my connection is pretty fast, around 75 Mbps.
I also checked out the caching issue you pointed out: you're dead-on. There's no caching whatsoever with HTML5. In general, the buffering behavior is kind of odd. Doesn't behave at all like the Flash player.
Oh good, so I'm not the only one with the caching issue! Wait, that's bad actually, haha. Were you using Chrome to test the cache? I'm going to try FireFox as well as that apparently hasn't had the buffering issue, so it may not have the caching issue either.
Weird that you don't have that resizing/offset issue when exiting fullscreen, but rather when toggling between video sizes. Everybody seems to be having different experiences.
Oh, maybe I wasn't clear: I do have the resizing issue when exiting fullscreen (not always, just sometimes). I was saying that there are other resizing issues in addition to that.
I was using Chrome 16 to test the cache. For the HD stuff, I must say: I can't find many HD videos to try it on. HD videos are more likely to be supported by big corporate accounts, and they'll opt for ads in their videos, too, which means that the video won't be HTML5-compatible (that's the real distinction). If the video doesn't have Google Ads, then it can be played in HTML5. Otherwise, it has to be Flash.
Yeah, it took me a while to find some HD videos. I noticed it when stumbling across an advert for Breaking Bad which was uploaded by a user, if I remember correctly.
I haven't tested on all of my computers yet, but I've updated to Chrome 17 on my Mac and the caching issue seems to have gone away. I believe I still have Chrome 16 on my Windows machine, so I'll hopefully be able to test them side-by-side.
[1] https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Design/crit.... [2] https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/05/on-the-criteria-to-be-us...