[john_reel]

Monetary cost of the book is the only cost for me. For many programming books, reading them cover to cover is a bad idea. You won’t retain information and you might even go against the motivations of the book. I like these ebooks because they’re a reference that works offline. If I have a question about a design pattern, or a bad practice, or about a feature of the language, I can reference the book in seconds. Skimming the book to get a summary of its materials, I can, in under an hour, learn when its material is applicable. Then, if I need it later, I can search it with a simple ctrl-f to build the knowledge.

Programming is a lot of material, but it’s repetitive enough that you have near infinite opportunities to practice it. You don’t need to cram, you just need to practice. For the things that aren’t repetitive but may still come up, there is Google and ctrl-f in your pdf reader of choice.

And I disagree with you about dubious value being a concern. If you’re going to bother using the book, you can bother Googling it to see if it is valuable.