the most effective method of improving your coding skills is to inspect and understand well written code. This fits very nicely into re-use and extremely nicely into perl (CPAN) where inspecting the code is quite an easy thing to do from a licensing and data format (mostly text) point of view. (As compared to some proprietary vendor where all you get is the documentation and an object library).

It is possible to learn coding fundamentals without coding but it would be damn hard to implement a solution without coding. But ‹sarcasm›some CASE tool vendors say it can be done‹/sarcasm›.

As for knowing algorithms and data structures. You need to not only know them but more importantly know when to use which type. In theory, that means you don't have to know exactly how the bits and bytes are arranged. But in reality, I've seen stuff called one data structure but actually implemented as another (ditto with algortithms).

-derby

update: Inspecting badly written code can be just as helpful.