A friend of mine, when we were kids and trying to learn about Linux and stuff, he hated questions. He always wanted to learn on his own through HOWTOs and books and man pages and docs.
I said “If we both spend three hours reading a book each and then a few minutes asking each other questions on the other’s book, we’ve saved time compared to if we both had spent six hours each reading both books”. Knowledge sharing FTW and learning through groups can be awesome!
There’s certainly a lot of merit to his approach; getting used to reading documentation is a great meta-skill in and of itself, and you can get a li’l bit of deeper understanding that way. So as always, you’ve got to case-by-case it but it’s good to be aware of the merits of both of these approaches.