How useful are guidebooks?

The books I’d ordered from Amazon have been in my possession for a few days now and I’m wondering how useful they are going to be. It seems to me that I have learned more about Ubuntu by figuring out how to set up my test environment for Joomla! than by reading the Ubuntu guide book. The required packages are provided on the DVD which was included in the Joomla! guide, but seeing as I wanted to learn something, I decided to download the newest versions (xampp and joomla itself). Downloading was not problem whatsoever, setting up xampp was a different experience altogether. I needed to use the terminal in order to extract the content of the package (tar). The first difficulty was that I had saved the package in the wrong place (correct place is apparently my home directory). So, after finding out that salient bit of infrormation (by reading the manual carefully the second time around), I hit another wall because Ubuntu doesn’t have a root user as such. Therefore the dreaded su command doesn’t work.
In these circumstances the Internet is your friend, and the Ubuntu forums and their wiki are brilliant sources of information. So, instead of su-ing, we sudo. And for the first time, my terminal does something other than giving me an error message. Hallelujah!

Now I can start xampp. Or so I thought. I have a 64 bit installation and xampp only works with 32 bit binaries. Again, the Ubuntu forums are a great help, and I download and install (from the terminal!, sudo-ing without needing to be told!) the correct binaries and now have a functioning local webhost with sql database.

There were a few more snags, all of them minor, and all of them gotten around with the help of the friendly Internet. Which means, without the help of my Ubuntu guide book. Which is why I’m wondering how useful it is going to be to me.
It is, however, very likely that I would not have needed to search as much, and maybe not at all, had I spent more time studying the book before trying to swim at the deep end.
Time shall tell!

There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the Joomla! book is going to be immensly useful. Extremely well written and really doing what I expect of a guide book.