I can still remember learning my first "real" programming language (Turbo Pascal[1]) in 1990, entirely out of a book! It took much longer to figure things out entirely on my own when I was stuck on something, but once I figured it out and overcame it I'd spent enough time working through it to gain a thorough understanding of whatever the problem was. Going through this process eventually gave me a much greater understanding of programming as a whole and made it much easier to pick up new languages. I fear this will be lost on a generation growing up with LLMs.

(1)https://archive.org/details/borland-turbo-pascal-6.0-1990