I’ve been coding for years in a multitude of languages, but other than one c class I had in college I mostly learned through osmosis, or learned new things as they were needed.
So my knowledge is honestly all over the place and with a ton of gaps.
I’m trying to learn rust and starting going through The Rust Book and afterwards I plan on going on Rust by Example and trying to code my stuff as strictly following best practices as possible.
Is that a waste of time? I mean rawdogging it has been working for me for a decade now. Should I just yolo and write what I wanna write in Rust and learn as I go?
Reading programming language books isn’t a waste of time. What is a waste of time, is delving into a programming language and finding out how little of use it is. You’d hate yourself for pursuing a programming language and find out that it has little purpose.
The point of programming however, is to be versatile. Do not be content. You may focus on one or two programming languages, but there are jobs and fields out there that’s going to require more programming languages so you might want to keep a head up on that.
But no, reading programming books is not a waste of time. Just do not expect one book to answer everything. There’s a reason why there’s tons of editions of C/C+ for example. There is something new to document and learn about with that programming language.