The manuals that came with development tools used to be excellent, too. Gosh, the manuals that came with computers used to be better than many technical books on the market today.
The first language I used professionally, in the late 90s, was Allaire ColdFusion. I worked for a small regional ISP, doing tech support, basic sysops, and some web development (we used FrontPage, hah!). We installed ColdFusion on our server, and since no one else was really taking initiative, I took home the books that came with, as well as the disk, and just devoured the information, and in roughly a week, I "learned" the language.
Haha yeah, I talked my dad into getting me the Borland Turbo C++ compiler for DOS when I was 12 or so and it came with a big ol' thick book that I attempted to teach myself with X-) https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-c/3x
