People read books about computer programming?
If you wander around, you have absolute freedom to discover anything and you'll almost certainly find things that a tour guide wouldn't show you. However, unless you go in with a comprehensive plan (good luck writing one before you know the topic well!), you'll probably also miss things that the tour guide would definitely cover.
If you hire a guide, you're out some money, but you have someone who knows the topic showing you all of the parts that they feel are important. You have structure and a narrative, which makes it easier to see the big picture. You can still explore on your own - but when you do so you'll have a base to start from and some ideas about where to go.
I've found that I learn best with a mixture of the two. I'll read a couple chapters of a book, then do a small project or write some exploratory code to cement the knowledge. In the course of doing that, I'll usually end up reading docs, StackOverflow answers, blog posts, other people's code on Github and other online resources. When I either finish or hit a wall, I read more and repeat.
Of course, there are bad books that make for awful travel guides. There's no point in having a printed copy of the documentation, or a long-winded book that spends 1,000 pages describing the basic syntax of a straightforward programming language. I think that when people think of tech books, those are the ones that come to mind - gigantic tomes full of reference material for outdated software. It's unfortunate, because there are plenty of really valuable books still being published.
Of course most tech books now show about as much thought as a series of blog posts, but for quality in-depth learning materials we still aren't at a point where books have been surpassed. And when the day comes that they are, I suspect that the result will look a lot like books, just in the form of a webpage.
If you want to do more than troll the API docs, or read your 25th monad analogy tutorial you really can't beat a high quality book.
To the extent that's your standard, I'm not sure that that says anything about the quality of online vs. print materials. I mean, find any set of print materials that is 1/2 as good as SICP, not including the print version of SICP?
If it about a new language or a new version of a language, I probably won't. But there are books with rich content that is very hard to find on the web.
But there are a lot of books/ebooks that worth having as regular reading or just as reference.
Few examples: The art of computer programming, Effective C++, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, OnLisp, among others.
Yeah, you can find a few of them for free as a digital version, but they were written in a book fashion with the regular editorial process that is lacking in a lot of wikis and on-line docs.
I definitely see space for both if the material is good.
Please, do not read any solid computer science books. That's right, Google will solve all your problems.
You'd be wrong to assume that people who can successfully read (and comprehend) documentation are going to be the first to Google their way to an answer. Quite the opposite, in my experience.
Computer science? Sure, read CS books. When I want to learn a framework, I've got no use for CS books at that moment. I'll use my experience with the language, and my ability to read docs to learn how to do things. For core concepts, where one is entering uncharted waters, I've found that a book can provide some helpful guidance.