I learned more by just taking the Doom source code and messing with it than I did from reading books. The main thing every language shares is the logic. Once you figure out how to translate your problem and solution into logical terms, using any language is rather easy; only the function names and syntax changes.

I've never written anything in Python, for example, but I am pretty confident that if I spent a day or so reading up on the syntax and functions and looking at some example snippets, I could port anything I've written in C, Java or Basic to Python.

I agree that books are dry as fuck and hard to keep up with as they tend to make a person fall asleep. But so much more learning can be done by examining others' code that does the things you're trying to do.

I did laugh at the Salesforce quip. I have seen it. It's a fucking mess lol