I first started from just reading “teach yourself” books. But I would say most of the actually useful shit I learned was just by sheer brute force fucking around with my own things and learning by doing.

God I hate learning by books.
I need a series of solution walkthroughs I can follow along with, until I get a solid foundation.

No.

I read programming books the way my wife reads cookbooks.

Yes. I think it’s massively useful to learn coding in a structured manner. And books will do that. I usually read at least one chapter at a time and then try to apply it. Either myself, or do the attached assignments. Plus it’s relatively fast to learn with proper material. You don’t need to search for the information yourself, they’re in the correct order and you’re unlikely to run into some dead ends because you missed some more fundamental knowledge (if you taught it yourself pretty randomly).

If I already know things, I just read a few more chapters at a time. That’s also some nice thing with books (in my opinion) you can read them as slow or fast as you like.

For me The Rust Book was useful for discovering features of the language, not to discover how to code with Rust

Generally the Rust Book, even in comparison to most languages, is considered to be very good and it is the expected way to learn the language. It won’t teach you everything, but it does give you a very solid foundation. The Rust community has put considerable effort into their learning materials.