This is exactly how I work as well. My feeling is the only way to truely understand a piece of code is to try solve the problem yourself and not simply read som

This is exactly how I work as well. My feeling is the only way to truely understand a piece of code is to try solve the problem yourself and not simply read someone else's solution. But, half the battle is then understanding _every problem the code is solving_. Often this seems undocumented. Further, even the simplest high level problems often have a bunch of corner cases that are only documented in a solution's implementation, and it's on encountering these corner cases in your own solution that it becomes obvious why the code was written in its original manner. Coming to a full understanding of the problem and solution often leaves me happy to throw away my own attempt. Sometimes I'll simply end up adding some comments to the code about the problems it's solving.