You can, and it will certainly help, but as the old saying goes "unfortunately no one can be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it for yourself". In some contexts no amount of reading will give you the insight that experience does.
And vice versa, too (granted my own learning style leads me to implementing what I read in little test projects, but I digress)
Overall though, I'm finding the more unique sensory info you give your brain, the better it gets at solving problems in general. Even if that info isn't very related to your goal.
It's a bit like trying not to be a hammer that sees everything as a nail.
Or is cope for a loss of neuroplasticity? Has to be evaluated case by case. “Experience” doesn’t count for much when evaluating new technical tooling. Landscape shifts far too much.
The landscape doesn't need to shift nearly as often as it does. But we are an industry obsessed with hiring magpie developers as cheaply as we can, and those magpie developers demand cool merit badges to put on their resumes, and here we are.
"Everything old is new again" does not BEGIN to do tech justice. Compared to nearly every other profession on the planet, tech knowledge churn is like 10x as fast.
I have been studying a different trade, completely unrelated to software engineering or tech, and by far the weirdest thing is reading books or watching seminars from 20 or 30 years ago that are still relevant. How much of technology writing has that honor? Very little.
Like I have been obsessed with tech and computers my whole life, I studied computer stuff when all the other kids were outside playing football or chasing girls or whatever, I self-taught to a very high level of expertise and that knowledge has just been getting systematically ripped away. Which is fine, to an extent, gotta embrace change and yada yada yada. But I no longer have the patience to grind to expertise-level on something over a period of years only to find out the industry has moved on to something completely different to do the exact same thing! All because some starry-eyed shit somewhere in FAANG doesn't like something!
The vast majority of computer science lectures from 20 years ago are still relevant. A ton has changed in terms of frameworks but the fundamentals are mostly the same.
Maybe I was in the wrong subsector of this industry but there was very little theory work in the jobs I have held. A lot of it was just reusing the same design patterns over and over again, and then scaling that out somehow.
I did not mean my comment to say that seminal works in CS theory are useless, just that most of the books published in this field cover more practical matters and they tend to age very quickly. Like I have an e-bookshelf full of Packt freebies back when they did that, and those books aren't really that useful now unless I want to start on an old version of something.
It is, but it isn't. Besides, from my vantage point almost all the work is herding frameworks of some kind. Maybe I need to get out of web tech and into something else.
One other point (since I can't edit): none of the used bookstores I am aware of take old technical books. Even the good ones (because they don't know and just see another tome that will likely sit on a shelf and collect dust)
