When I was 12 years old I had a family friend-let's call him James. James was the son of my dad's best friend, and I saw him as a bit of an elder brother figure. I followed him around and tried to copy anything I saw him do, usually unsuccessfully. One day I saw James make a website. Naturally, I had to start making websites, so I whined at my dad until he bought me the HTML Black Book, and read the thousand-page tome cover to cover in a weekend-pretty much the exact opposite of the "find a project first" approach. Then I started making websites.
Having read the entire book was incredibly helpful. Anytime I thought of a feature I wanted to add, or wanted to rearrange the site in a certain way, I knew how to do it-or at least, I knew that there was some pattern that would easily solve exactly what I wanted to do. I made sites for myself, for my school, for my friends-and they were decent. Not fabulous, but my sites were a lot easier to update and maintain than the site my school's $250/hour consultant had built (tables were visibly different on each content page!)
I used the same approach when I finally started writing code professionally 10 years later. In one case I solved a problem in 17 minutes that my coworkers had spent months trying to solve, because I knew that there was an existing function that did exactly what they were looking for. These things were surprisingly hard to find in Google, but having near-encyclopedic knowledge of the language's features made it a lot easier. Instead of searching for a general problem in an obscure language, I knew the exact function name I was searching for and only had to look up syntax.
Memorization is incredibly useful, even in a problem-solving discipline like programming. And having an encyclopedic knowledge of your language is extremely rewarding when you remember a simple way to solve a complex problem :)
Having read the entire book was incredibly helpful. Anytime I thought of a feature I wanted to add, or wanted to rearrange the site in a certain way, I knew how to do it-or at least, I knew that there was some pattern that would easily solve exactly what I wanted to do. I made sites for myself, for my school, for my friends-and they were decent. Not fabulous, but my sites were a lot easier to update and maintain than the site my school's $250/hour consultant had built (tables were visibly different on each content page!)
I used the same approach when I finally started writing code professionally 10 years later. In one case I solved a problem in 17 minutes that my coworkers had spent months trying to solve, because I knew that there was an existing function that did exactly what they were looking for. These things were surprisingly hard to find in Google, but having near-encyclopedic knowledge of the language's features made it a lot easier. Instead of searching for a general problem in an obscure language, I knew the exact function name I was searching for and only had to look up syntax.
Memorization is incredibly useful, even in a problem-solving discipline like programming. And having an encyclopedic knowledge of your language is extremely rewarding when you remember a simple way to solve a complex problem :)