Within technical fields it hosts that material, too. Once you know the name of a book it's usually easy to track down a PDF somewhere :).

That might be, but it might not be in the future and meanwhile I'd be weary of drive-by downloads and virus infected warez.

Anyways, you are missing the point, that teaching involves conversation and that can't be easily gotten from a book. Sure, a book is a good supplement, some are called companion, even, and with programming the need for good documentation is called out often enough, but still.

> That might be, but it might not be in the future and meanwhile I'd be weary of drive-by downloads and virus infected warez.

Honestly, I'd call it learning experience on using the Internet ;).

> teaching involves conversation and that can't be easily gotten from a book. Sure, a book is a good supplement, some are called companion, even, and with programming the need for good documentation is called out often enough, but still.

Teaching involving conversation with a good tutor can indeed be even more efficient than books. But that's a pretty rare situation (average university classes don't count - too much people, not enough time, too crappy tutors). Books are a good substitute - in fact good books for a given subject exist exactly so that you can learn something without having a specialist explain it to you face to face.

Companion books is something I'd generally avoid, since they exist to support a class, not to give you information.

Nevermind university, a publicly visible lisp community just doesn't exist, with all due respect, to motivate it's use, books or not. That sounds dismissuve, but Programming should be a social effort in the large.

I guess the point I was trying to make is that patronage at the right time might have a lot more potential to generate motivation, insights, etc. Professors in huge classes are too distant for that, agreed, but one benefit of university is the social experience. Outside of university, stumbling on the right path without guidance would be extremely lucky, while finding a good book on the internet depends on asking the right questions and one single book certainly isn't enough. And most people need guidance on how to work through books, to begin with. Sure, with regards to information technology, the internet hosts the largest community there is to learn from, but arguably it is, again, almost too big for a novice (and might have a lot of negative side effects).