Wouldn't it make sense to create more interactive content so readers/users can try out the code as they go along?
One upside to the days of paper-only was that I was forced to hand-enter a lot of code to see it in action. It made me pay more attention to the code than if I had just cut-n-pasted or loaded up a file.
Often the code would fail the first time I tried to run it. Then I needed to figure out where the error was. It was quite instructional.
RFDL (run-fail-debug-loop) is a very useful approach to learning.