Books are about communicating experiences. A great book can give you the knowledge it would take years to get by personal experience alone. If anything, people involved in programming don't read nearly enough. We have giants on whose shoulders we should be standing, and instead we just retrace their footsteps. We need to stop ignoring our past.

Obviously, practice is also critical, but my point is most people who love to program love the act of programming, so they obviously already do a lot of that.