[dave333]

At the time there wasn't really a good search engine, Yahoo's hierarchy of interesting sites was just starting. No Slashdot and no Google to find it to see how to do things or fix particular problems. Not much OSS to take as an example. Online doc was dry and limited. Blogging only started in 1994 so not much out there yet. But as the web took off books quickly became almost irrelevant.

The framework obstacle course for developers took off. My particular path through it was POJS, YUI-ext, EXTJS, Dojo, jQuery, Backbone, Angular, React - probably about 2 years each give or take.