Sure, you can ask companies to give their new hires books to read and pointers on what to learn. However, it's even better if the new hires already read books to improve their craft. On their own initiative. There is still plenty of stuff to learn when you start at a new place, the new codebase for example (and possible the domain). So it is good if you are already up to speed on the programming part.

This is an example of the three dimensions of programmer knowledge: Programming, Domain and Codebase. I recently wrote more about this in "Programmer Knowledge" here: http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/15/programmer-knowledge/