This is probably the best (and most effortul) way to aquire the knowledge initialy.
I did it a lot back in school, then few months upto a year later I would forget most of the material all the same.
I'm already rereading the most valuable books and it does help to retain their knowledge.
I guess doing spaced repetition every x time would help even more.
I feel that rereading and to a larger extent spaced repetition are very wasteful.
I am.
About 70% are technical books related to my job (SWE) and the rest are combination of textbooks and popular science in fields that I find very interesting.
If for some reason I lose interest in a book then I just stop reading it and don't mind if I don't remember anything from it.
I think consciousness is one of those things that is not defined well enough for us to understand it.
Until there is a breakthrough in the understanding of consciousness itself there won't be any real conscious ai.
It's like when we learned to fly, we needn't understand how birds' wings work.
We had to understand the principles of aerodynamics or what is flying itself.
That's why I think imitating the brain won't work, (deep learning etc.) just like the early attempts to fly didn't, even if we'll know the function of every single neuron.
You can't prove even that.
If you examine it closely, the argumnent only proves that "it" thinks.
"It" is not necessarily an "I", for what restricts the thinking to an I (i.e a part of reality)? It could be the whole reality that does the thinking as far as the argument goes.
I used it few times, it's as good as the others.
I don't think there ever will be a silver bullet, what works for some companies won't work for others.
The real issues are people issues.
Direct your learning by what you need for your work.
You can watch videos on the frameworks and tools you're using, read blog posts on issues you might have etc.
After you have some more experience (and confidence) start reading books. Your first one should be Code Complete 2.
The main issue with Rails (it's the same with other frameworks) is that it discourages from doing proper design.
The only design decision you make is where to put a piece of code, which is ridiculous ("Fat models, skinny controllers" is a bad design heuristic.)
Following Rails conventions works for small (simple) applications, but over time you arrive at a point where no one understands the whole thing.
At this point someone suggests moving to microservices, and all hell breaks loose.
Growing Object Oriented Software Guided by Tests. So far I didn't learn anything from it, and it's hard to read more than ~10 pages without falling a sleep.
Next on my list are Software Architecture in Practice and Programming Pearls.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, A Guide to Rational Living by Albert Ellis, Feeling Good by David Burns - changed the way I see and cope with things and people that used to "cause" me lots of stress in the past.
Behave by Robert Sapolsky, The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson, Thinking Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman - we are animals shaped by evolution. The human brain isn't perfect and makes lots of silly mistakes. I learned not to belive everything I think.