The manuals were great. I taught myself C/C++ in the early 90s mostly from the big stack of Borland books that came with Turbo C++. It’s hard to imagine learning something like that these days by simply sitting down and reading reference manuals.

Towards that end, I've been trying to put together a list of Literate Programming texts:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...

I really wish that there were more, in particular, I'd dearly love to see a graphical QT (or other up-to-date) GUI app as a Literate Program.

Me as well, as a teenager those manuals were invaluable, it wasn't as if we could easily learn elsewhere.

It was either the manuals, or getting lucky with magazine articles or local library book selection.