For anyone that wants youtube

The idea of the video is to demonstrate an alternative way to think about putting holes into a surface. Rather then make the surface and then try to cut the holes, this video demonstrates a method where you can start from the holes and fill in the gaps to create the surface.
Default primitives for poly cylinders were used and no effort was made to optimize the poly count for this example. Also, cylinder end caps are intentionally left as ngons as they are planar and will not be deformed, uv'd, or textured and so will render just fine.
The video demonstrates a number of poly modeling tools - combine, edge and poly extrude, offset and thicken, split polygon tool, insert edge loop (options) and the merge vertices tool (target weld), as well as useful techniques like vert, curve and grid snapping, , and adding edges to control edge tension.