Speaking from a background of math, where you can literally find out everything from first principles if you need to: Memorization is useful, and reading even w

Speaking from a background of math, where you can literally find out everything from first principles if you need to: Memorization is useful, and reading even without memorization is also useful. It means that you have more tools at your immediate disposal, without having to hit the books or the internet. In the same way that there's a vast gap between knowing the rules of grammar of a language, and being able to string a sentence together in a conversation, there's a similar gap between knowing facts and theorems, and being fluent enough with them to pull them into a proof when you need them. The extra familiarity from extra studying vastly expands what you're able to do with your tools, and how quickly and easily you're able to do it. It's worth pointing out: Getting real experience basically confers the same benefit, and probably does it better, but not all engineering disciplines are as fortunate as software engineering in the availability of experience. A programmer can just fire up an editor and start making programs, with zero cost and near-zero risk. A civil engineer, say, cannot start building bridges with anywhere near the same ease.