Technical Writing: Learning from Kernighan
> The tutorial throws the user straight into the experience of using awk. There is no theoretical discussion first; there are no installation instructions; the first thing you see is an input example and a short program doing something with that input. They even get to the expected output on the very first page.<p>Babies learn a language by hearing you talk. In other words, by example. No one has become fluent in a language through theoretical discourse and grammatical diagrams.<p>That is counterintuitive. You would think you would learn better by having someone explain it to you, instead of throwing a mish-mash of examples your way. But that's not the truth. The truth is we learn by example and practice. Eventually you want the explanations, to round out your understanding. But it doesn't make sense until you have got your hands dirty.<p>So that's a lesson for anyone wanting to teach anything. It's okay to have a little introduction, but try to get to concrete examples as soon as possible.