Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

There was, for a long time, a wall. If you walked into a book store, past the magazines and the cookbooks, you’d arrive at the computer section, and along one wall there was a stretch of books with cartoon animals on their covers. A rhino for JavaScript. A camel for Perl. A python (obviously) for Python. And whatever this was: They were thick, they cost about $50, and they had titles like “Learning React” and “HTTP: The Definitive Guide”. If you wanted to learn how to do a thing on a computer,..