I'll have to admit something about myself -- I've never been able to learn how to do anything from just reading its first principles. I need to have a working example that I can then adapt and change and observe changes in the result.
This has been especially true in programming. I've been writing programs in some capacity for 18 years now and not once in that time have I been able to simply read the reference manual of anything and following that write working code on my first try. Well, obviously I've been able to do it for trivial things, like after the Python 2->3 switch when map/filter/range started returning iterables instead of lists, simply being told "map/filter/range/etc. now return an iterable and not a list" is sufficient to explain the change in behaviour, but that's only because I know all the concepts behind it. You could say the explanation is only one level removed from my intuitive knowledge. Things start getting exponentially harder the more levels removed they get, i.e. if it's a new concept explained using new concepts previously defined, but for which I have no intuitive knowledge what they mean.
This has been especially true in programming. I've been writing programs in some capacity for 18 years now and not once in that time have I been able to simply read the reference manual of anything and following that write working code on my first try. Well, obviously I've been able to do it for trivial things, like after the Python 2->3 switch when map/filter/range started returning iterables instead of lists, simply being told "map/filter/range/etc. now return an iterable and not a list" is sufficient to explain the change in behaviour, but that's only because I know all the concepts behind it. You could say the explanation is only one level removed from my intuitive knowledge. Things start getting exponentially harder the more levels removed they get, i.e. if it's a new concept explained using new concepts previously defined, but for which I have no intuitive knowledge what they mean.