Read a book?! Are you kidding me?! Is that all you educated guys can come up with on issues that would take days to hunt for solutions within an 800 page future paper weight/door stop? Come on!
How did you solve problems before the advent of the internet forum? Has instant gratification come this far?
If it would take you days to use a book to answer your questions or solve an issue ... that says more about your skills as a student than if anyone on this forum is as helpful as you would desire.
Give a man a fish he eats for a day ... teach a man how to fish ... well ... you should know the rest of the parable.
My whole point on my last few comments in this thread is some folks invest too much effort in subjective classification of the intent of the advice offered and spend far too much valuable time in psycho-analyzing the motives of the person who offered it. Yes, the aforementioned books can achieve 'paper weight' status ... but they shouldn't reach that point without the reader wringing out every last morsel of information the tome can offer.
I have several books on my office shelf ... and by the Lr/Ps/ACR version numbers printed on many of the covers ... time has passed them by ... but ... they still can offer invaluable knowledge about the basics of all those solutions that can still be considered applicable to current tech in many situations. Especially where the authors discuss the 'WHY' and 'WHEN' we should do certain tasks before they explain the 'HOW' ...
Quite often I am tasked to offer up a product that requires a function in Ps or Lightroom I haven't utilized recently and realize I need to refresh my 'learning' to replicate something I have done in the past. It doesn't take days or even hours because I already invested in a solid foundation of study over the past 24 years of using imaging software. That's not bragging ... that's just the reality of the effort it takes to keep up to date. It's a never-ending process of education.
In the end, forum participants can take or leave the advice about further educating themselves or utilizing recommended resources. However, the books (and the advice) in consideration only truly become a door stop material if the reader deems them so. Though if they never take up the opportunity to crack the cover ... they'll never know the true value of the information on the pages within.