I hate to sound stingy but at $445 is there a cheaper alternative? Like a book, or maybe shorter series?

What videos would prioritize over the others?

His book Clean Code would be a good start to what he has to say. The SOLID principles are important.

Then I'd move on to Domain Driven Design and probably Refactoring and Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided By Tests.

Those four will give a good start to what enterprise/OO people are expecting in design.

I say that because currently $445 represents 12 weeks of food for myself.

It depends heavily on your place of living. In my country $445 is about or over the monthly salary for vast majority of people.

Well yes, $445 can relatively be a lot of money, however, in times of globalisation and developers being in high demand one just has to think outside the box a bit and join a company remotely if possible. I'm not saying it's easy, but can be done.

While I don't disagree that Bob Martin presents useful information in those videos, his presentation style is... bizarre to say the least.

You'll find as you watch them that the signal-to-noise ratio drops with each episode. In the last few, there's about ten minutes of useful information mixed in with about 50 minutes of cosmology lessons, tours of his house and neighbourhood, and babble amongst his various alter egos (Data, Sherlock, Spock, Minecraft guy, Ruby guy, Microsoft fanboy, and so on).

Everyone has their own threshold for how much of that they can tolerate. For me, it crossed that about five episodes ago.

I asked elsewhere but perhaps I asked the wrong person. Which episodes would recommend in particular for the highest bang-for-my-buck?

My memory's a bit foggy about what's in each one and how much of an acid trip they all are, but I'd say episodes 6-14 are kind of the sweet spot you're looking for. The next several, from 15-19 cover some good stuff but are getting really wacky, and beyond that could be good if they weren't so damned weird.

To be on the safer side - you can download videos from torrents and pay afterwards for the episodes you find valuable.

DAS is great too: http://www.destroyallsoftware.com/

Gary Bernhardt is currently working on a book:

https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/485978334434586625

You could do worse than learning from his book when it comes out!

Geez! That guy on the thumbnail for the first video (Clean Code - The Last Programming Language) looks really angry. I don't think I want to learn anything from that.

Scroll down.

It gets so weird you'll soon forget that first thumbnail.