>>Welcome to computing. Lesson one: you may slouch at coding, be whatever you like, but you will never stop learning.
>>
>>Hey, cheer up - you don't really have to do all those things. You only have to know them :)
>
>I don't mind learning when it has practical value.

Computing is one of the rare areas (now how's this for pronounciation) where theory has practical value. It's not like questions on purpose of learning trigonometry the kids at the high school asked me - because they knew they'll be welders, locksmiths, blacksmiths or just *smiths (though I had a way to shoot back at this kind of question). It's rather that the theory here arose from the practice, and any new theory mainly serves as an approach for solving a whole class of practical problems.

OTOH, not applying theory had cost many of us many hours of wasted work.

Of course, there's some things I don't like to have to learn, like "what's this year's word for directory", or "which version of IE4 install is appropriate for which configuration", "what does which patch fix for", though the value of these things is only practical, no theory involved. I simply don't like them :)