[sfpotter]

It may well be. Books have tons of useful expository material that you may not find in docs. A library has related books sitting in close proximity to one another. I don't know how many times I've gone to a library looking for one thing but ended up finding something much more interesting. Or to just go to the library with no end goal in mind...

[calepayson]

Speaking as a junior, I’m happy to do this on my own (and do!).

Conversations like this are always well intentioned and friction truly is super useful to learning. But the ‘…’ in these conversations seems to always be implicating that we should inject friction.

There’s no need. I have peers who aren’t interested in learning at all. Adding friction to their process doesn’t force them to learn. Meanwhile adding friction to the process of my buddies who are avidly researching just sucks.

If your junior isn’t learning it likely has more to do with them just not being interested (which, hey, I get it) than some flaw in your process.

Start asking prospective hires what their favorite books are. It’s the easiest way to find folks who care.

[weakfish]

I’ll also make the observation that the extra time spent is very valuable if your objective solely is learning, but often the Business™ needs require something working ASAP

[oytis]

It's not that friction is always good for learning either though. If you ever prepared course materials, you know that it's important to reduce friction in the irrelevant parts, so that students don't get distracted and demotivated and time and energy is spent on what they need to learn.

So in principle Gen AI could accelerate learning with deliberate use, but it's hard for the instructor to guide that, especially for less motivated students

[sfpotter]

You're reading a lot into my ellipsis that isn't there. :-)

Please read it as: "who knows what you'll find if you take a stop by the library and just browse!"

[alwa]

I admire your attitude and the clarity of your thought.

It’s not as if today’s juniors won’t have their own hairy situations to struggle through, and I bet those struggles will be where they learn too. The problem space will present struggles enough: where’s the virtue in imposing them artificially?

[bee_rider]

This should be possible online, it would be if more journals were open access.

[sfpotter]

Disagree, actually. Having spent a lot of time publishing papers in those very journals, I can tell you that just browsing a journal is much less conducive to discovering a new area to dive into than going to a library and reading a book. IME, books tend to synthesize and collect important results and present them in an understandable (pedagogical?!) way that most journals do not, especially considering that many papers (nowadays) are written primarily to build people's tenure packets and secure grant funding. Older papers aren't quite so bad this way (say, pre-2000).

[alchemism]

I've done professional ghostreading for published nonfiction authors. Many such titles are literally a synthesis of x-number of published papers and books. It is all an industry of sorts.

[bee_rider]

I think I don’t disagree. Only, it would at least be easier to trace the research concept you are interested in up to a nice 70’s paper or a textbook.

[znpy]

> It may well be. Books have tons of useful expository material that you may not find in docs

Books often have the "scam trap" where highly-regarded/praised books are often only useful if you are already familiar with the topic.

For example: i fell for the scam of buying "Advanced Programming in the unix environment" and a lot of concept are only shown but not explained. Wasted money, really. It's one of those book i regret not pirating before buying, really.

At the end of the day, watching some youtube video and then referencing the OS-specific manpage is worth much more than reading that book.

I suspect the case to be the same for other "highly-praised" books as well.

[usefulcat]

You could make much the same observation about online search results.