As a developer, do you read Programming books?

Used to in the past, but no longer.

I seem to learn faster by simply reading on-line materials in one window and writing sample code with lots of comments for myself in another. By keeping each concept in a separate example file, I can always refer back to things I have forgotten because I rarely use them.

I worked for a large company in which we routinely asked candidates what book they had read recently. In group interviews, at least one of us would have read the book mentioned. Often the candidate had not read anything. Sometimes they tried to BS their way through the answer. Some admitted they seldom read books and that led to a discussion on how they learn. If they acquitted themselves well, they were considered. My favorite answer of all time was the guy that told us the last book he read was “50 Shades of Gray” and that he really like it. He didn’t get a callback. The bottom line, demonstrate motivation and learning skills regardless of method.

I mostly keep them for reference purposes and when I feel like casually exploring a topic.

If I am actively learning something, I usually need to be hands-on with my toy project (which is never really a toy project as in it has to do something of value to me), and books are too slow to go through questions I might have while building stuff.

I do enjoy an ocassional "historical" programming book for a subject I care about (eg. Codds Relational Model for Database Management), but rarely will I read a book cover to cover.

Yes.

Some many times, some one and done.

Some for understanding history, how things got to be how they are, _why_ things got to be how they are. Smalltalk, for instance.

Others to learn a new thing. The Rust Programming Language was my latest.

Books used to be the way that knowledge was transferred. A lot of that went away with the Internet: Stack Overflow, MDN, cppreference, etc. But I still find that I learn differently reading a book than I do walking through an online tutorial.

Nope, never had.