I mostly keep them for reference purposes and when I feel like casually exploring a topic. If I am actively learning something, I usually need to be hands-on w

I mostly keep them for reference purposes and when I feel like casually exploring a topic. If I am actively learning something, I usually need to be hands-on with my toy project (which is never really a toy project as in it has to do something of value to me), and books are too slow to go through questions I might have while building stuff. I do enjoy an ocassional "historical" programming book for a subject I care about (eg. Codds Relational Model for Database Management), but rarely will I read a book cover to cover.