Everybody is free to study said textbooks, yet there are not many successful competitors to Google. Published research is several years (or decades) old; since it got published probably it was not successful enough to start a profitable company out of it; as you read more you become more confused about contradictory theories. You could also go for the "industry best practice", alias the least common denominator. For example Java on top of enterprise database on top of huge hardware. Sounds like the first dot com boom ? So yes, read those books, and do your thing. You might even enjoy it. See "worst is better" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

There are open source people that demand respect. For example Guido is called "benevolent dictator fro life". Other less liked examples from OpenBSD (Theo de Raadt), and glibc (Ulrich Drepper) Whether you like those people or not, you cannot deny the projects are not successful. At least you heard of them