I call it "depth-first" vs "breadth-first" learning. In the first case to learn a thing you learn all its dependencies and you understand everything about X on

I call it "depth-first" vs "breadth-first" learning. In the first case to learn a thing you learn all its dependencies and you understand everything about X once you learn it (but you take a long time before you can connect the dots, it's frustrating cause you wait long for the feedback, an it's harder to learn dependencies without understanding what they will come useful for later). In the other case you skip the details and learn the general idea, then (if you have time) - you make another pass going into more details, and so on. The good thing is that you have general idea about everything quickly and you know more or less where to look for more details if you need them. The bad thing is that you don't really understand most things, you just think in leaky black boxes until you're forced by the debugging to learn the details. This is the difference between my wife's (a math teacher) and my (a programmer) learning styles, and we had it very hard to overcome these differences when learning together at university :)