Indeed, people used to read programming books (I still have two C++ Builder and a "Complete Java Reference" bricks on my bookshelf), but IMO the problem is not that people don't read books, but that a good written reference documentation are very rarely written(or are hard to find) for today's new languages.
It seems all classes of content from video, to blog posts and books suffer from various con-people publishing lots of crap with catchy titles and ordinary people just loose hope browsing through them. In such environment the cost of time spent on a crappy video or blog article is negligible, but if one buys books that are badly written or auto generated one can waste hours and hours before one realises.
So I can't blame today's wannabe programmers for choosing videos and blog articles instead.
> but IMO the problem is not that people don't read books, but that a good written reference documentation are very rarely written(or are hard to find) for today's new languages.
Ok, but you can get most of Perl5 from 25 year old books at this point. (Wasn't the version number changed to 5 for a book anyway? or was that Perl4?). A little modernization help might be nice, use bytes vs use chars?, less emphasis on mod_perl which doesn't seem widely used anymore, maybe some coverage of Moose, etc. But if you got the basics from a old book, you'd be fine to learn the rest.
On the topic of new languages, I just started somewhere where they use Rust, and read the O'Reilly Rust book and seem to have done ok; lots of style comments on my first diff, and I'm slower than in other languages I already knew, but otherwise seems fine.
I forget what book I read to pick up Erlang; may have been Joe's or the O'Reilly; but that's an older language... It was public for ten years prior to me picking it up, and private for 15ish before then.
It seems all classes of content from video, to blog posts and books suffer from various con-people publishing lots of crap with catchy titles and ordinary people just loose hope browsing through them. In such environment the cost of time spent on a crappy video or blog article is negligible, but if one buys books that are badly written or auto generated one can waste hours and hours before one realises.
So I can't blame today's wannabe programmers for choosing videos and blog articles instead.