I think that a well-written language specific book can be much better than the internet, because they can take you from the beginning through advanced concepts

I think that a well-written language specific book can be much better than the internet, because they can take you from the beginning through advanced concepts in a structured way. This means you can really see how everything fits together, why the language developed the way it did, and how to do things the "right" way. One example of this is "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide" (the Rhino book). In some respects this is exactly the kind of book that the article is criticizing: it's huge, it tries to be a reference book, it's specific to a single technology, it's about something that real programmers should be able to figure out on their own. But it was much quicker to read it than to try and make sense of the scores of tutorials out there that each explain one small part of the language. Yeah, I could have all figured it out anyway, but that doesn't mean it would have been the best way to do it.