Interesting, as I'm exactly the opposite.

Are there names for these two types of teaching/learning approaches? Is one "better" than the other?

"Bottom-up" vs "top-down" is the general name for the two approaches, although they're not specific to learning (also e.g. to project planning).

Edit: Actually I'm not sure that's really right, even example-led approaches are usually bottom up. For example, an example-led approach to programming would start with "hello world" and work up from there, leaving a full-blown example project (if there is one) to the end.

Completely non-ironically, I prefer a middle-out approach. I like to dive in past the "beginner" stage immediately, and go from there. If I feel like I need to go back and learn the basics, I can do so on a need-to-know basis.