I don't think how it's useful to you matters, since we're talking about "intrinsic" value of knowledge. Unless I misunderstood the meaning of the word.
I am not sure that I learned much from the article. Pretty much, it summed up to "work hard". HN crowds are probably more enlightened to know how much that "hard" is, compared to average people who think going through related education would be enough.
Anyway, those fast-track programming books are not totally useless. I started with those too. The important think is to not stop there, but continue to work with more technical books and actual standard/specification.
If I want to learn new language i.e, Clojure, F# etc, I'd probably start with fast track books (free ebooks) too. It has become a habit, I guess.