[tdeck]

> And I really did find myself buying a lot more programming books than I do now. When's the last time you picked up a book just to learn how to use a language - just the ins and outs of the syntax?

Perhaps this is an age difference thing? I'm 29 - I learned to program between 2003 and 2010 from online resources, mostly in the pre-SO era. I learned BASIC, Perl, PHP, and Python entirely online. My impulse was always to just Google things, although I fully admit finding results was more time consuming and frustrating back then. The only language I learned from a book was FORTH, and that's mainly because it's an older language and Starting Forth is one of the few good resources on the language even today.