I particularly don't like this approach to programming. Building things is an important aspect while learning to program, but it should not be learnt by just go

I particularly don't like this approach to programming. Building things is an important aspect while learning to program, but it should not be learnt by just googling and figuring out how to do a particular thing. I think learning to code neatly in a language and learning what a particular construct does, is really important before you start googling and copy pasting things from stackoverflow. With the above method, you can become a decent guy/girl who knows to put things together, i.e. build skins over databases(as quoted in a previous HN article). If you take this approach, then you would have learnt some aspects of the language, and hence won't have the patience to go through an introductory book again. I programmed in python for a year without knowing how python variables are actually names, because I was too impatient to go through a introductory book.