Yes! I miss it too. For me, that book was Head First PHP & MySQL[0] - Late 2000's, I was living and working in Thailand for a family friends small logistics company in the capacity of a BA, trying to move them into this century. We were trying to find a vendor for any system that would allow us to keep track of the movements of shipping containers within a container yard, and something sparked and I thought "hey, I did a semester of programming at Uni, how hard can it be?!", over the span of the next 6 months or so, this book helped me put together a solution that scarily, they are still using to this day.
Fast-forward 15ish years and here I am, still cutting code, although in the capacity of a dev lead, but after all that, I have the book to thank.
[0]https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/head-first-php/97805961...
I did spend the next year or so adding features, bug fixes, etc. It was very much a case of learning on the job and I was quite fortunate to be in the position that I was. I think it was 2 or 3 years later I managed to land a dev role at Agoda (who had offices in Bangkok at the time)
I don't know who it was, it might have been one of the guys my dad worked with, be they said "You won't be able to write a game with a book like that, but you might be able to write a phone directory." Didn't phase me.
I remember someone asking me later on if I was going to write a game. I just looked at them blankly and said: "I'm going to write a phone directory".
I just learned today that "Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours" was co-written by Jessee Liberty, one of my all-time favorite technical book writers. "Programming C#, 2nd Edition" was a great book.
I loved tech stores too. I still have all of the Apple pamphlets that CompUSA had sitting next to the display units.
I learned C first in high school because I found a pirated copy of "Learn C in 24 Hours" online, and I actually felt that they did a reasonably good job getting me started, though if I recall correctly some of their examples with pointers and memory management were actually incorrect. Still, it was enough to make programming interesting to me, and when I dropped out of college the first time I was able to salvage a somewhat decent career because of that interest.
I think the “in 24 hours” thing was more a case of “I’m going to tell you everything I know about XYZ in 24 hours”. Still, I have so many fond memories from the late 80s and 90s spending countless lunchtimes at McGills or the Technical Bookshop in Melbourne (now since long gone), flipping through tech magazines and wondering which of the many weighty tech tomes I’d spend my precious hard-earned on.
Yes in 24h you are not going to learn enough to contribute to Linux kernel - but also will be ahead of something like 80% of general population.
Some of those books were laughably bad. But thing I miss from back then, was the feeling that the book was going to be the key to getting you started writing whatever crazy idea you had for a program in your head.
I think the last time I had that feeling was walking out of Microcenter with a new MacBook and an iPod Touch, ready to make the next Angry Birds...