Here's an analogy - anyone can go out and cook a meal. And, they can make modifications to that meal. Sometimes successfully and sometimes ... well, let's just say that the compost pile is sometimes higher than at other timess. However, someone who has a structured foundation in cooking, be it from a school or parents or significant experience, can make changes to known recipes easily. They also know what unspoken changes need to be made to keep a recipe successful. And, they do it faster.

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

For the most part, I've had to do things before learning (if that's how I should say it). I find that for those things that I learn before I try to apply them (C++, in my case), I tend to take a much better approach to things, and that as a whole I produce higher quality work.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, things that I have to learn on my own (SQL, for example), I don't always take the wisest approach the first few times through. When we started writing the new version of our software here, we had all been used to reading through records one at a time from a flat-file scheme (legacy apps/platforms - gotta love em!). So when we first started using a real RDBMS, the first thing we did was use cursors to process rows in our tables one at a time. Little did we realize then how much better performance we'd get using set operations ;)

So, yeah, I think learning before doing makes a difference ;) Sometimes we don't get the luxury of doing so though.

MrCromeDome