[alxlaz]

Plus, it's not like it's any different when you're a full-time employee somewhere. No job that you want to bet your career on consists of nothing but stuff you already know how to do.

Some companies understand this and attempt to keep their engineers ahead of the curve -- so you're asked to do something with the understanding that you'll have to figure out how to do it first. Some companies don't do that, and it's up to the engineers to make that happen on their own -- so you often end up reading the book first, then telling whoever is in charge that you can do it. Either way, your regularly end up having to get a few pages ahead in the manual :-).