Unless you haven't. Hands-on is very important, especially early on when learning something new. But after the early stages, hands-on only takes you so far. You need to hit the books again.
You'll learn more starting out in Rails, for instance, by getting the basics of controller actions and their relationships to views and then immediately code some stuff. After that you can code till you're blue in the face but you still won't know nothin' bout polymorphic relationships or has_many :through. For that, you need to read some more.
I found over the years I need to have a steady cycle of practical coding, reading, coding, reading. It just depends. If I'm in the heat of getting features out the door, I don't read at all usually, I'm just doing what I do. When things settle down for a bit, I pull out something to read that pushes my weak areas. Maybe algorithms, or TCP/IP stuff I've neglected, or going over stuff I knew at one point but lost out of my wee lil noggin.
That said, when I'm reading that stuff I'll usually have a terminal open where I can practice, either in the shell, repl, mysql terminal, etc. So the cycles of reading/coding can be get real short. That's when I get the most into my brain, actually -- long sessions of doing both together.
You'll learn more starting out in Rails, for instance, by getting the basics of controller actions and their relationships to views and then immediately code some stuff. After that you can code till you're blue in the face but you still won't know nothin' bout polymorphic relationships or has_many :through. For that, you need to read some more.
I found over the years I need to have a steady cycle of practical coding, reading, coding, reading. It just depends. If I'm in the heat of getting features out the door, I don't read at all usually, I'm just doing what I do. When things settle down for a bit, I pull out something to read that pushes my weak areas. Maybe algorithms, or TCP/IP stuff I've neglected, or going over stuff I knew at one point but lost out of my wee lil noggin.
That said, when I'm reading that stuff I'll usually have a terminal open where I can practice, either in the shell, repl, mysql terminal, etc. So the cycles of reading/coding can be get real short. That's when I get the most into my brain, actually -- long sessions of doing both together.