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Well not everybody can do this kind of top down learning. But more power to you, though, because that's a great capability.

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I would argue that most people can't, which kind of irks me that recommendations like this have been the status quo for quite some time. I think programmers in general over romanticize this way of learning.

>I would argue that most people can't, which kind of irks me that recommendations like this have been the status quo for quite some time.

It's not a static property we each have -- one can learn to learn differently. I would argue that sort of information gathering is vital to documentation-heavy professions, programming included.

In other words : (imo) if you can't learn that way, you're doing a tremendous disservice to yourself by not looking for methods by which to learn how to learn that way.

The best way I've learned C is to write tiny command-line programs for every possible task.

Need to get the current path? Forget `pwd` or `cwd`, I'll write my own.

Need to know the number of files in a directory? I'll write my own.

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