Buying one book every six months would have been a lot cheaper.
They'll still sell you that subscription, of course (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy.aspx). Nowadays though the documentation portion is all available free on the Web (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library), at least. Progress!
Compared to CGIs/PHP? Yeah, sure, finally it almost behaves like a normal GUI library. And the way things going, we're probably going to get our Taligent/MFC library soon...
I know, the OP (and Louis CK before him) were mostly arguing against the Nirvana fallacy, where people complain about the status quo as opposed to some mythical idea of perfection. Problem is, I don't see the whole browser stack as superior to previous art (i.e. definitely not mythical). Things like NeWs or Smalltalk.
The closest thing would be something that does almost everything in JavaScript and would abstract the HTML/CSS underpinnings away, but that's certainly not the current approach to "proper" web design (ExtJS would come to mind).
Honestly, I'd be hard-pressed to find any prior system with that many layers (VBScript?)...
You're right, though, I used to buy volumes of Inside Macintosh and read them, cover to cover, over a cup of tea. I learned C++ from a book, too. I actually miss that style of learning; I like to understand my tools comprehensively, and not to just skim whatever I need from the reference and leave the rest as a mystery. I know that there are lots of programmers who spend their whole careers glomming together bits of other people's libraries, but that just doesn't appeal to me.
It was basically impossible to get any information about CS fundamentals before I got access to the WWW. I guess people in universities must have had access to textbooks, but as a working professional I didn't know enough about what I didn't know to even know there was something to look for, much less have anywhere I could try to find it.
I think you're presenting a false dichotomy, and expressing inappropriate disdain for people with different learning styles from your own. For one thing, you can gain a deep understanding by using a library, language etc. in a nonlinear fashion. For my part, reading a book about programming from front to back 5 times and working the examples will leave me with long-term retention of somewhere in the neighborhood of 0%. Actually using the language and libraries and digging deeper as I need to gives me a far stronger grasp. I don't know everything there is to know about every feature of Core Graphics under OS X, for example, but three years since I last touched it, I could easily ramble for hours about all manner of crufty real world knowledge that I gleaned from using it.
BBSes were linked and people transferred files and knowledge everywhere, much like they do today. FidoNet existed, which had a good sized community. I bought one of my first PCs on there. This was many years before eBay and Craigslist existed. ASCII text files existed, which contained a wealth of information. One of the few free sources of information on how compilers work is an ASCII text file. People still refer to this source, despite being nearly 2 decades old now (http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/)
Granted, I do not really think it is that bad, but still, the "dark ages" were hardly dark in this sense. I've been reading some of Knuth's "selected papers" series lately. Just reading about how he and others approached problems is amazing.
It wasn't the Dark Ages.
Maybe more like the Early Dawn Ages.
Both approaches had some good sides to them and it's a shame that they're not even considered as options now, which GP seems to demonstrate.
I wrote out a lot of pseudo-code and drew diagrams and when stuff didn't work I could often figure it out by poking through the K&R book or the manual for my compiler.
As it became easier to spread code and ideas it also became easier to spread more sophisticated but sometimes opaque libraries and tools, and perhaps ironically it is those new libraries and tools that most require the increased communication because while they offer more power they also introduce more complex bugs and quirks.