I need both. Truly learning for me is learning core concepts, but examples are “known correct” cases I can test that understanding against. If something in the example is surprising, I know my model isn’t complete yet (or the example is wrong lol)
I also find “known incorrect” examples to be useful, for analogous reasons.
But the worst is when there is no good and thorough description of the conceptual model and of how the concrete examples relate to it, because then the system remains a black box you can’t properly reason about, regardless of how many hands-on tutorials and cookbook examples you’ve seen.
Yes! Both are valuable, and sometimes you need to iterate between and within each. Like if the conceptual components are mutually recursive (A is defined in terms of B, B in terms of A (SOLR anybody?)), skimming the docs can give you a "pencil sketch" level model, examples can flesh out the relationships between components, and re-visiting the docs with extra context can provide a more precise model.
