That's really the basis for the "Learn X the hard way" tutorials. There's a number of books that propose to teach a topic quickly/easily, with the shortcut bei

That's really the basis for the "Learn X the hard way" tutorials. There's a number of books that propose to teach a topic quickly/easily, with the shortcut being that you won't have to go through all the exercises. It turns out that's an ineffective teaching style for most computer/science topics. For many of these topics, you really can't short-cut that process of implementing solutions and learning from doing.