Cultures are complex things; encompassing, amongst others, habits of thought, a common vocabulary, shared values, a sense of group history, and so on. The hacker culture is indeed quite heavily defined by its ways of thinking and shared values, which don't need to be learned from "some damn book". However, all the other aspects that together constitute a culture do need to be picked up from other members of said culture - and with a culture as distributed as hackerdom, that would indeed be best done by reading books.