I would always encourage any form of education, coding included.
The way I learned how to code was to play with pre-written pieces of code myself.
1. I would say to myself... I want to see if I can write a loop to print out a message.
2. Then I would go and google for the code.
3. Copy and paste it into my own file, and change it to do what I want.
I'm willing to bet that most of the hackers on HN learned how to code this way. That's why we call ourselves hackers right?
I guess this is similar to your approach but in a more controlled environment?
