[warent]

This is an excellent way of looking at it. Frankly it's not necessarily a bad thing either if the content of the book is valuable and you put it into practice effectively. Then it has the added bonus of really cementing itself in your experience banks.

I like to look at good knowledgable books like having a personal mentor who sits down and patiently monologues about their experience. In reality its hugely useful.

[alxlaz]

Plus, it's not like it's any different when you're a full-time employee somewhere. No job that you want to bet your career on consists of nothing but stuff you already know how to do.

Some companies understand this and attempt to keep their engineers ahead of the curve -- so you're asked to do something with the understanding that you'll have to figure out how to do it first. Some companies don't do that, and it's up to the engineers to make that happen on their own -- so you often end up reading the book first, then telling whoever is in charge that you can do it. Either way, your regularly end up having to get a few pages ahead in the manual :-).