alt Hacker NewsI don't feel that LLMs are replacing books for professionals.
The problem with LLM learning is not that they can't explain a concept, but you have to know what to ask in the first place. To get a deep proper answer from LLMs you need a deep precise prompt. When you learn the new topic, you don't know about the topic itself, so you need a properly structured interleaved material to grasp new concepts.
After you get the concepts from books, you can prompt the LLM for particular non-covered subjects you are interested in.
So even these days when I'm interested in some topic, I sometimes even ask the very same LLM to provide me top-10,top-20 books for the topic, with short overview for which type and level of readers and style they are, pick a few and read them.
LLM is a replacement for docs and simple questions on StackOverflow, not for the real organized knowledge that requires a few hours session of concentration to understand.
You can ask them for high-level overviews of a given topic, and then drill down into individual sections of its response. With the most recent iterations, many of the times I have blindly stumbled into something new, it has pushed back with warnings