Counterpoint: part of how I learned from smarter people was to copy their habits, and part of their habits was to read good books with good practices.

Learning how to read non-fiction books, as I discovered, is actually a skill that needs to be learned, as my historian friends who wolf down thirty books in a week will tell you (the trick is to read only the parts you need instead of reading cover to cover, though I am still learning how to learn).

And counterpoint to counterpoint: While fields in the humanities are 'book-based', CS is mostly 'article-based'. And furthermore, on the bleeding edge, textbooks don't exist yet, documentation is shoddy, and sometimes you have to read the original source code.

Reading only the parts you need sounds awfully like consulting the docs, source, or talking to other people (stack overflow, Reddit, etc falls into this category for me).