“I am not the one to sit down for a lecture to learn new technology.” I heard this from a number of people every time I promoted an in-company Bootcamp class. Our industry has a heavy tendency to “recon by fire” when it comes to adding new tech to an existing stack. Code examples, blogs, and documentation will help you get off the ground, but will rarely allow you to provide a finalized solution you could put into production and leave.
Enter deeper guided #learning in the form of online courses and in-person instruction. There is a great #advantage to learning about an underlying technology you chose outside of the context of your problem.
When you explore the #valueproposition of a given technology you are able to see its capabilities for what they are. Do your best not to jump the gun on the first functionality that looks like it could be a solution to your problem. Keep the learning going in its pure form. More likely than not your problem is not unique and there is a specialized feature set that might be perfect for solving your problem in a more succinct way.
Staying away from your specific problem domain while learning also eliminates the illusion that you understand the technology in question because you found a possible first-pass solution to your problem.
i, gotfryd 