[samatman]

This is something I miss from the era when I learned to code: thick books of reference material, designed to be comprehensive. At the time, your compiler was called Superlative Language Number, and you had confidence that as long as you double checked the Number.Subnumber supplement, it would keep working the way the thick stack of paper promised it would.

What you memorize here is the table of contents, and approximately where each answer is inside the book. Search might be better at first but it doesn't scale like logarithmic search over a static pile of paper.

There are programs I can still apply this approach to, vim comes to mind, but for the most part documentation is ambient now, with the leading search engine delivering meaningfully worse results year over year.

[nickm12]

Yes! I learned a number of languages from O'Reilly books and it is a qualitatively different experience than learning through a bunch of disconnected StackOverflow questions.

Both modes of learning have their place and a combination of a comprehensive overview plus detailed treatments of specific corners gives so much more understanding than either alone.