> It may well be. Books have tons of useful expository material that you may not find in docs

Books often have the "scam trap" where highly-regarded/praised books are often only useful if you are already familiar with the topic.

For example: i fell for the scam of buying "Advanced Programming in the unix environment" and a lot of concept are only shown but not explained. Wasted money, really. It's one of those book i regret not pirating before buying, really.

At the end of the day, watching some youtube video and then referencing the OS-specific manpage is worth much more than reading that book.

I suspect the case to be the same for other "highly-praised" books as well.