Woodworking at Home DVD Magazine: Discontinued — What to Read Instead
A DVD-format woodworking magazine, obsolete along with the format. Where that kind of instruction lives now.
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Woodworking at Home was a video magazine distributed on DVD. The publication and the format are both finished — most computers sold now have no optical drive at all.
Where that instruction went
Free video absorbed it. Long-form project builds, technique demonstrations and tool reviews are all on YouTube in far greater quantity than any DVD magazine ever carried, and several of the presenters who made their names in print-and-DVD woodworking publish there now.
Paid subscription video also exists and is generally better structured — a curriculum rather than a feed. If you learn better with a sequence than a search box, that is worth the money.
What video is good at, and what it is not
Video is unbeatable for motion: how a plane is held, how a cut is fed, what a correctly tuned mortiser sounds like. You cannot get that from a photograph.
Video is poor for reference. When you want to know why quartersawn timber moves less across its width, or what moisture content to build furniture at in your climate, you want a page you can return to and a table you can read, not a video you have to scrub through.
That division is the practical reason to keep at least one good book in a shop full of free video.
What to buy
Bruce Hoadley’s Understanding Wood, linked below, is the reference that keeps getting recommended decades after publication. It is not a project book and there are no step-by-step builds in it. It explains what wood is and how it behaves — grain, moisture, movement, shrinkage, why a panel splits when it is glued into a frame — which is the knowledge that determines whether the furniture you build survives a change of season.
Almost every failure in a beginner’s furniture traces back to wood movement. This is the book about wood movement.