My layman’s understanding, based solely on the quote you cited, is that it criticizes books for not providing proper instruction — being just pupils, readers need a tutor. The only way this could relate to programming libraries being reused is if people didn’t even read the books back then, much like they don’t read the libraries' source code right now.

I’m by no means agreeing with the quote, nor am I against reusing programming libraries carelessly; I just don’t see how the two are related.