&gt; The primary emphasis of this article seems to be: &quot;Stop playing with code and start reading books&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s more like &quot;Start reading books about the code you play with&quot;.<p>Personally, I&#x27;ve always hated when people copy-paste some code without bothering to understand it and I think this is also what the author rants about.<p>By &quot;bothering to understand&quot; I mean read the code author&#x27;s comments or docs, then read the code and make sure it looks like it actually does what&#x27;s advertised, modify things you don&#x27;t like&#x2F;need, play a bit with things you totally can&#x27;t understand. Test it before plugging into something bigger and having to debug it <i>then</i>.<p>Or, to use OP,s analogy: Got an appliance? RTFM before you waste few hours using it suboptimally or it cuts your fingers.