[necovek]

How people differ: before SO, I've rarely bought language books because most of them had reference pages readily available. I've learned and used heavily all of Python, Perl, PHP, SQL (with MySQL and Postgresql), a bit of assembly (NASM and GNU as), low-level details of C too (from ISO C9x draft), JavaScript, HTML and CSS and plain TeX, not to mention structures of x86 and VBE programming (I played with writing minimal kernels).

This was all before 2001 while I was in high school, with books being very hard to get in Serbia, so internet was my go to resource.

Now to be honest, even after SO, I only use it as a last resort. Somehow only 1/20th of the problems I hit match what people seem to hit on SO :/