[antigonemerlin]

Counterpoint: part of how I learned from smarter people was to copy their habits, and part of their habits was to read good books with good practices.

Learning how to read non-fiction books, as I discovered, is actually a skill that needs to be learned, as my historian friends who wolf down thirty books in a week will tell you (the trick is to read only the parts you need instead of reading cover to cover, though I am still learning how to learn).

And counterpoint to counterpoint: While fields in the humanities are 'book-based', CS is mostly 'article-based'. And furthermore, on the bleeding edge, textbooks don't exist yet, documentation is shoddy, and sometimes you have to read the original source code.

[inhumantsar]

Reading only the parts you need sounds awfully like consulting the docs, source, or talking to other people (stack overflow, Reddit, etc falls into this category for me).