Because most of us do learn to a degree by osmosis, the issue of samples is interesting.
I recall back in the day learning lisp, before the internet, { no laughing } I think it was easier to learn then because I had to work it out myself essentially.
Kerry, I agree 100% that learning by "figger'n it out yerself" is the best way to learn, however, one must take into consideration that many times, one is under huge time constraints to accomplish some task in order to keep employed. This makes "copy and paste" a much more attractive option, and even to a point, makes it understandable. I learned VB by buying a book, and reading and doing the examples. The book was chock full of errors, and figger'n out how to make it work like they wanted taught me FAR more than the actual text in the book did. But, I wasn't doing it for a living yet!!
Oh, I forgot to mention my point! Don't be too hard on the "copy/paste" crowd...