I think it&#x27;s really about interleaving &#x27;doing&#x27; and &#x27;reading&#x27;.<p>I used to be more of a reading person, but I find that I am a bit faster to learn now if I lean more towards doing.<p>First I try to understand if something WORTH learning.  For example, is R worth learning?  Yes.  Is React worth learning (for me)?  Not sure yet but I&#x27;m keeping my eye on it.<p>Then I try to first get a &quot;hello world&quot; running without too much understanding.  This can actually be the hardest part... building software is sometimes harder than understanding the ideas :)  And once I have hit a wall playing with things, then I need to go back and read some more to figure out the concepts.<p>Once you&#x27;ve played with enough software, you can get surprisingly far just by doing things, and actually learn the concepts.  Other times you can get stuck and need to go back and do some research.