I am old enough to remember the days the only way to learn how to program was to go through, sometimes very dry, books and manuals. There was no Internet on those days.

Join the club. We're getting T-shirts made. :-)

The thing is, in those days we really could learn all the commands of an operating system shell by reading the manual cover to cover in an afternoon, or play with graphics demos or write low-level system utilities after reading the Pink Shirt Book.

Today's systems are so vast and complicated that anything offering similar coverage in book form would be the size of an encyclopaedia, so the way we were able to learn doesn't scale to modern needs.

The trend over the years has definitely been towards writing glue code and joining up ready-made components for a lot of professional work rather than reinventing things from scratch, and in some ways that's no bad thing. However, I think it only works if you know what you've got available in your toolbox, and so does being the person who understands and creates new components. Either way, it comes back to needing a way to navigate the vast amounts of information now available and pick out the bits you need to achieve whatever it is that you're trying to do.