There was a time in the 90s when you actually could breeze through a book and know the language. Not Perl, obviously ;)

I won’t attest to the quality of your mental software architecture, but you’ll know the language…

It was around the time C++03 came that things no longer fit in a single book and you need a bookshelf of books to know a thing.

The web circa 2001 was easy enough to build entire sites from scratch in a week with no frameworks. The web circa 2021 was a complicated mess of frameworks on frameworks rediscovering server side rendering (the OG method) again.

I’m a fan of the books that take you through a project start to finish and not chunk it up into mini exercises.