alt Hacker NewsI don't understand this. Back in the early days of the internet, you absolutely couldn't learn 'how to do it' without finding obscure books or knowing someone. Now though? You can learn all of it, and find the resources almost instantly. Want to build a computer, self host, program, you have millions of resources at your hand.
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Things that are easy to do don't necessarily mean that's the right way to do it. Grueling work sometimes helped you learn far more than just getting the answer to something easy.
Back in the early days of the internet, there were FAQs written about everything. You could talk to people who actually knew what they were doing, as opposed to today.
>you absolutely couldn't learn 'how to do it' without finding obscure books...
QBasic's bultin help/documentation was good enough for me..
There were a lot of books written back then on programming. My local book shops had a section dedicated to computer programming - including all the popular programming languages of the day like C, C++, Basic (and eventually Visual Basic), Java and so on. The books were technical and specific, but they were incredibly easy to find. And back in those days book shops were everywhere.
I learned C, Java, JavaScript and Obj-C from books over the years. Those books were honestly much better resources for a beginner programmer than most online resources are today.