Does your office have a library?
Lots of good questions in this, but to answer the question in the title:<p>When I started working corporate in 1999, every engineer had their own library of tech books.  We would all share books with each other.   You could tell how senior someone was by how big their book collection was.<p>At once point, one of our senior people got laid off.  Since the books were bought by the company he had to leave them all behind.<p>Us juniors descended on his cube like vultures, negotiating and trading all of his books to start building up our own libraries.<p>When I left the company they let me buy my books for $5, so I took them with me, and took them to my next two jobs. I stopped carrying them when everything the contained could be found online.<p>I have to say, I do sometimes miss learning tech stuff from books.  While it's all online and in theory up to date, there is something to be said for the curated experience of a book.