Absolutely. It's like hiring a tour guide rather than wandering around. If you wander around, you have absolute freedom to discover anything and you'll almost

Absolutely. It's like hiring a tour guide rather than wandering around. If you wander around, you have absolute freedom to discover anything and you'll almost certainly find things that a tour guide wouldn't show you. However, unless you go in with a comprehensive plan (good luck writing one before you know the topic well!), you'll probably also miss things that the tour guide would definitely cover. If you hire a guide, you're out some money, but you have someone who knows the topic showing you all of the parts that they feel are important. You have structure and a narrative, which makes it easier to see the big picture. You can still explore on your own - but when you do so you'll have a base to start from and some ideas about where to go. I've found that I learn best with a mixture of the two. I'll read a couple chapters of a book, then do a small project or write some exploratory code to cement the knowledge. In the course of doing that, I'll usually end up reading docs, StackOverflow answers, blog posts, other people's code on Github and other online resources. When I either finish or hit a wall, I read more and repeat. Of course, there are bad books that make for awful travel guides. There's no point in having a printed copy of the documentation, or a long-winded book that spends 1,000 pages describing the basic syntax of a straightforward programming language. I think that when people think of tech books, those are the ones that come to mind - gigantic tomes full of reference material for outdated software. It's unfortunate, because there are plenty of really valuable books still being published.