Ok, I'm guessing the purpose of the post is exploring efficient methods of learning quicker.
Personally, I say tons of examples and exercises to test that you understood said examples.
For instance, someone gives you an api, but only gives you an explanation of the parameters. It is left to you now to figure out how exactly this api works(Does it take the full file path?, Is it the printer ip or the printer name? Is the array associative?) Now if I wanted to figure it out, I would draw from my experience how things like this normally works. Normally, it is two or three choices for every parameter and you fiddle with it until you figure out the correct format for what you are doing. So, with 4 parameters that is like 16 combinations, which aint so bad.
Now, if the creator of the api, had given an example of each unique way of using his api, learning the api would be much easier. Since now instead of debating what each parameter means and how to supply the given format, he can simply copy the example format[O(n)vs O(2^n)]. Learning without examples is an exponential function. Learning with examples is a linear function and learning matrix style is constant time.
[Did I just reduce all learning activities to be a function that takes parameters and to efficiently learn is to find an efficient algorithm to figuring out the best parameters?]
Personally, I say tons of examples and exercises to test that you understood said examples.
For instance, someone gives you an api, but only gives you an explanation of the parameters. It is left to you now to figure out how exactly this api works(Does it take the full file path?, Is it the printer ip or the printer name? Is the array associative?) Now if I wanted to figure it out, I would draw from my experience how things like this normally works. Normally, it is two or three choices for every parameter and you fiddle with it until you figure out the correct format for what you are doing. So, with 4 parameters that is like 16 combinations, which aint so bad.
Now, if the creator of the api, had given an example of each unique way of using his api, learning the api would be much easier. Since now instead of debating what each parameter means and how to supply the given format, he can simply copy the example format[O(n)vs O(2^n)]. Learning without examples is an exponential function. Learning with examples is a linear function and learning matrix style is constant time.
[Did I just reduce all learning activities to be a function that takes parameters and to efficiently learn is to find an efficient algorithm to figuring out the best parameters?]