Like many other people here I learn in an evolutionary manner. I dive in, get something working, reflect, notice pattern(s), try and get more working, recurse.

Like many other people here I learn in an evolutionary manner. I dive in, get something working, reflect, notice pattern(s), try and get more working, recurse. However, I tend to like to seed my evolutionary exploring with some canonical knowledge first. For example: When I was learning Perl, I first read about "make repetitive tasks easy", "good text processing", and then got hacking. When I was learning Lisp I read about macros, recursion, list-processing, and then got hacking.