Which rather reinforces the point of the headlined article: People actually learn a lot of stuff when they start out from tutorials, guides, handbooks, and whatnot; not from purely reading reference doco. I started out with books, too. Later people would have started with the likes of TLDP.

I suspect that the author is right that most people started with guides/handbooks/tutorials, even the ones who later on convince themselves that they only read reference doco.

O'Reilly's bestiary had an exceptional line-up of Unix classics in the early 2000s.