> "if you don't have the first part of dedicated learning and wide exposure (without a motivating problem per se) you inevitably end up doing the lazily evaluated "stack overflow driven development" since you haven't been exposed to the breadth of the language, frameworks, etc systematically. in other words, you don't know what you don't know."

Totally agree. I'm doing exactly this. But instead of only read books and type the code, I'm also after each section of the resource (doc || book), practicing code challenges :)