A book is somebody’s whole life of mistakes, handed to you for the price of a weekend.

Somebody spent twenty years getting something wrong in every available way, then compressed what they learned into a few hundred pages you can read in a weekend, often free from a library. That trade is absurd in your favor. It does not replace your own experience, but it does mean you can skip a whole category of avoidable errors before you make them.

Pick one area where you are about to start from scratch and read a book by someone who has done it. Read with a pen, marking only the parts that are warnings. Those pages cost you nothing and would have cost plenty to learn.