I work at Fermilab. This is still a thing. In fact it is getting difficult to find the uncoated aspirin that dissolves in the same way it did back on the day.
I'm sure a new solution will be adopted some day. The aspirin is likely just a novel cheap and, at the time, easily available solution. Possibly we won't need them in the future because we'll accelerate beam with superconducting rf cavities. Check out the PIP2 project https://pip2.fnal.gov/how-works.html
What makes a canonical approach ideal? In my experience, there are few jobs worth having that provide a bible. I can see that a bible would be a convenient teaching aid, but it misses a great opportunity to teach research skills as well as critical thinking and discretion.
Please let me know if I'm way off base.
The most valuable thing you could give a young learner is a solid foundation upon which to scaffold future learning. You are absolutely correct in saying that research skills and discretion are hugely important and valuable. However, someone who hasn't yet build a solid foundation of understanding will have a VERY hard time assimilating content he researches into a coherent mental model of how everything fits together.
Therefore, my advice to begin with a single canonical resource is that this increases the likelihood that someone's introduction to this stuff will be coherent and well-reasoned, and will introduce him/her to solid fundamentals. As someone who has been involved with teaching kids and coding, it is unfortunately very much the norm that "coding" classes devolve quickly into copy and paste exercises, and the reason for that is that is that kids' gap in understanding ends up simply being replaced by pattern-matching.
With programming, you have so many competing motivations/factors -- what you want to build, what you are learning, why you are building/learning, etc. -- that it becomes quite challenging to juggle everything coherently. I've always favored a single canonical resource to start because, more than anything, it is a way to drown out that noise. If you pick a good book, there is a rationale behind the order topics are introduced and there is reason to the increasing complexity and difficulty of the exercises presented in the book. If you hop around doing different things, you massively increase the chance that there is some basic concept you won't learn and that you will start creating an improper mental model of how things work. And, without this canonical resource, you may have a really hard time seeing that the reason you are struggling is because you lack some basic understanding.
So, I agree with you that there are no jobs worth having where a "bible" is provided; but I think that a learner -- and especially a novice learner -- greatly benefits from a resource like that to ensure that they have solid fundamentals onto which they can then graft other knowledge they seek out themselves.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think I see where you are coming from now. Now that I think about it, I even have some personal experience with the benefits of canonical learning.
I was a copy and paste web-developer for a while and it got me by but just barely. At some point, I discovered Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial. Rails was pretty foreign to me compared to the basic HTML/JavaScript stuff I was doing but I found it interesting and gave me the opportunity to learn web development from first principles.
Learning Rails in that environment made me a much more thoughtful and deliberate developer. All my applications since, even though they aren't in Rails, have benefited from that experience.
I have had personal experience with being commissioned to write a comprehensive resource for work. It is really a futile task in a lot of cases. Things change so quickly that they are different before, during, and after the writing and editing process. This does allow for the room for the learner to fill in the gaps and develop critical thinking and discretionary skills.
I think I was seeing this as too black and white when there are many shades of gray.
