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by m0zg 1696 days ago
There are a lot of different genres within guitar, and a lot of different variations in instruments, and ways of playing the instrument (fingers, pick, hybrid, tapping, legato, slide, combination thereof), heck even within picking there's also "economy", "sweep", "downstroke", and "alternate" picking, so you'd need to narrow it down by a lot.

For rock/prog I think Rock Discipline by John Petrucci is the best book available if you're prepared to put in a lot of work and, well, discipline. The name is not accidental: it's hard AF, so if someone is looking for a silver bullet, keep looking.

But at least for guitar a book is not a replacement for a good teacher, and it can't be: there's too much nuance and too many ways to screw things up. Screw up your right wrist movement, and you won't be able to play fast. Screw up your left hand position, and you won't be able to do legato (hammer-ons and pull-offs) and chords will be difficult as well. Synchronization is hard too, especially in hybrid styles, where not every note is picked. Screw up muting and you won't be able to play clean. And the worst part is, you don't even hear yourself as you're playing, if you aren't recording, because your mind is struggling to control and synchronize your hands, which takes more effort than it does on a piano because the left hand does something completely different from the right. That's not even considering that music theory is much harder to learn on the guitar than it is on the piano.

Even some established guitarists don't really know how to play properly (Kirk Hammett or Slash are perennial examples), and a lot of those that do know how to play don't know the theory. They've just learned the technique and a few licks, and that's enough if you don't have to learn someone else's music and don't need Petrucci's levels of sophistication. But knowing theory really opens up the instrument and makes it a lot easier to learn pieces, since you get to see the "grammar" of the thing.