[alexpopescu]

I find the "advice" in the post a bit confusing. Finding an answer on SO or a forum or a book will help you solve a specific problem (thus making you a "productive" coder). But I seriously doubt it will make you code faster in general if this "code snippet copy & paste coding" is not expanded into understanding so next time the search part is removed from the process.

In the early days, it always took me a lot more time to get from finding an answer to using that answer in my code. The main reason is that I didn't want to just copy paste something without understanding it. On the other hand, a more experienced colleague of mine was sifting through books and forums and pushing code a lot faster. I talked to him trying to understand what I'm doing wrong. As I've learned (actually both of us learned), the only difference was the existing knowledge each of us had about the environment and the app. Over time I got to be a lot faster at finding an answer and moving along, but that came only with becoming more familiar with the tools/lang/etc and being able to understand things faster.