Swimming is better on your joints, helps build correct breathing practices, and makes you look good. Wear a pair of jammers and a swim cap if you want to go truly fast. Be sure to stretch, warm up, and cool down properly. Don't know any good vids, anything on youtube is surely good. But practice makes perfect. Don't worry about learning to do flip turns if you don't have someone to watch what you're doing wrong or teach you. You'll get into bad habits that way.
A good swimming exercise (assuming you know how to swim)
500 yard warmup
10x50 yd freestyle, you should aim to get each 50 below 45 seconds (wherever you swim, they should have a big clock visible from everywhere to time yourself) if you have trouble doing this at first, keep them under 1 minute. If you can't make these times, keep going with no break. You can take a longer break after the first 5
4x100 yd medley, you do 100 yards of each stroke with no break in this order: butterfly, back, breast, then freestyle. Work on form here
2x200 yard swim of stroke of your choice, try to keep this below 3 minutes
5x100 freestyle, keep each 100 below 1:45 minutes. If you can't, do 2 minutes. If you can't do that, you keep swimming
200 yard cooldown
A decent enough mix of sprints and long distance. If you want more long distance, instead of that last 5x100 you can do 3x200s at a 2:30 minutes. For the medley, if you can't do the strokes, practice them. If you want to be a real nigga, do what my team called commandos. Wear a pair of jeans and a shirt and do 1x500 yd where every 25 yards you get out of the pool and do 10 pushups (20 if you aren't a pussy) and do another 25 and get out and do 10 crunches (again, more if you aren't a baby back bitch). Throw squats in there too if you want. In fact, make it 20 pushups, 10 crunches on one 25 and 20 squats, 10 crunches on the other.
If you have specific things you want to work on, use kickboards to practice your kicks and work the legs. If you want more resistance on the arms, check out hand paddles and purchase a pair of those. Be sure to practice strokes before you try to seriously swim them. Be sure you also know how to proper breathing technique when swimming.
Don't breathe every stroke for freestyle, you want to breathe, at most, once every 3 strokes. To breathe properly for freestyle, whatever side you have your arm out of water, that's the side you breathe on. All you need to do is turn your head so your mouth is out of water.
Back stroke shouldn't need any explanation on breathing.
For breast stroke you need to keep your arms tight, when your hand hit your ribs, they need to be brought in towards your chest which propels you up a bit. When your head comes out of water, that's when you breathe.
Butterfly is a pain in the ass and my worst stroke by far. But you pull yourself out of the water like in your image and that's when you breathe. (Watch videos for all of these strokes and try to mimic them pls. Practice makes perfect)
If you find yourself breathing too much, work on breathing exercies. You want to be able to swim completely under water for 50 yards minimum. Try doing some of the above with a limited number of breaths, but don't try to kill yourself.
Finally, bring water. I know you're in water, but your ass will dehydrate and you will die if you don't.