High yield information sources for Software Development

Software developers have to repeatedly and continually learn massive number of new concepts, procedures and techniques related to the latest languages, frameworks and technologies up and down the stack.

The best way to learn would of course be to continuously read books in the spare time one isn’t solving problems on the job and apply that knowledge.

I personally find reading books too time consuming for me. Books are presented in a depth first fashion, delving into multiple areas in depth one by one. This is not ideal for becoming productive quickly. There is no explicit ordering of how necessary /​ frequent a particular concept /​ technique is either.

What other sources of information /​ classes of sources are highest yield for picking up new technologies quickly [In the sense of getting productive fast].

An example of a high yield resources are well made slide decks. As an example, a slide deck on a language(e.g. javascript) made for experienced developers new to the language is much faster to process than a book. I can absorb the major features of the language, the syntax etc from a good slide deck in a fraction of the time it would take to read the introductory chapter of a book.

Any general comments (or specific sources) on how one would go about learning a new tech stack quickly would help too.

My current stack is linux, apache, python, django, dynamo, js, backbone