Some of us started coding before the internet was available. We learned syntax from books, and copied programs from magazines and dissected them to work in diff

Some of us started coding before the internet was available. We learned syntax from books, and copied programs from magazines and dissected them to work in different ways while learning what all the different parts did. We also learned how to reverse-engineer working programs to see how they ticked. It wasn't 'better' or 'worse', just a different way of learning.