With all the above in mind, my favorite book for learning and or re-learning Qbasic has been:“ I assume your question was not meant as "why use old technology like a printed book instead of HTML pages", but "why read longer texts about programming written by one or few authors". You can think of books as structured collection of information about a certain subject.
It has the advantage that someone has made the effort to build each chapter onto each other to make understanding the topic easy. Usually, you are also told what the boundaries of the information are (what is covered and what else there is that you need to look out for elsewhere). After reading and working with it, you can be sure of having achieved a certain skill.
If you want to learn with the fast forward button pressed, a book can force you to work through every aspect without skipping the boring parts, at least if you trust the structure of the book. The collection named "book" is most often useful as a reference, too.
Using the Internet, blogs, "fiddling around", etc. usually falls into the kind of unstructured information. You get loads of bits and pieces of wisdom, but you have to do more search work to get to build up your knowledge, because no one will guide you in saying "learn this first or you won't see the merit of that stuff you have googled up now". You might miss certain parts because they are too boring or no one told you they were important. You might learn things wrong, because not everything written on the Internet is first quality. You might spend a lot of time filtering out useless search results.
You might waste days with trying to accomplish something on your own, just because you didn't know a certain design pattern or programming construct and no one told you. The less you know, the worse it gets with unstructured information IMHO.
To put it a bit provocative: I would never trust an architect to build a bridge which I have to cross each day if he told me he had never read a book about bridge building or structural analysis but just learned it by fiddling around and using Google…"
Statistics: Posted by michealey — Tue Sep 16, 2014 7:18 pm