Let's be honest: I don't. They sit on the shelf gathering dust until I eventually make a project needing some of the knowledge contained within. I then dust it

Let's be honest: I don't. They sit on the shelf gathering dust until I eventually make a project needing some of the knowledge contained within. I then dust it off, scour the index for references to, say, "lock-free multithreaded programming", and read as many sections as I can about that, and as many supplementary chapters as are needed. A few years back, in my teenage years, I read a programming book about compilers cover to cover, I don't remember much about the contents, just one or two lexing techniques and something about directed acryllic graphs.