Just today, I went back to one of my old textbooks (Lathi's Signal Processing and Linear Systems) and came out with some really important points about Fourier a

Just today, I went back to one of my old textbooks (Lathi's Signal Processing and Linear Systems) and came out with some really important points about Fourier analysis that I'd missed the first time around. A good, carefully written textbook makes hard choices about context, sequence, presentation, and level of detail. It's a coherent whole. All the information might be out there on the internet, but the cognitive load of evaluating whether the source is trustworthy and relevant, and of interpreting it without supporting context, is much higher on the internet than it is with a book. And then, there are the pleasures of fiction. I can't argue for fiction other than to say that it's good in a way nothing else is, and you have to experience it to understand. If you want to try, start with good short stories. You could do worse than the sort of "anthology of classic short stories" they sell in the bargain bin at the used bookstore. There's often gems in there. Look for O Henry, Mark Twain, de Maupassant, Dickens, maybe some of Balzac's shorter material. Skip anything that doesn't grab you. Once you've developed an appetite, try more involved works. Survivor bias operates in your favor here: 19th and early 20th century works that we're still talking about are generally quite good, and there are quite a lot of them. Both recency and copyright law oppose you finding good novels written in the last century. There are many, but you're more likely to miss something good because it's not fashionable, or read something bad because it is. So yes. Books are worth it.