[WoodenChair]

This misses a big part of why books and lectures are much more effective than the author presents. In books and lectures a practitioner is offering you shortcuts and advice to avoid pitfalls and accelerate your learning in a polished well thought out way (if the author/instructor is good - big if). Sure, not everyone retains them. But for those who do they can practice by doing without banging their head against the wall as much.

My experience is that those who can pay attention to a book/lecture and do plenty of practice by doing are the fastest learners.

[tstrimple]

Which lesson will you carry with you longer? The time you saw a presentation and the speaker warned against X, or the time that X bit you in the ass and you learned from experience why it’s a bad idea? Much of the detail you’re referring to can absolutely be learned valuably from a presentation, but folks with more experience can grok the lesson and reasons behind it much better. Presentation and book learning absent practical experience leads to things like everything being forced through an OOP lens for example.

[WoodenChair]

I said both together is best. You can glean insight from both. It's not an either/or.