Overview before details please

As a kid, I once started to look at a book on how to draw things. It was probably filled with reasonably good advice, but I didn't keep looking at it for very long. Maybe I looked at it as a possible purchase (or to ask for...) but the information didn't make sense to me. What it did was start off with drawing lines and circles and ovals to rough out a shape of a person or animal. But that wasn't the shape of the thing being drawn! It had all this extra crap. What good was that? And since it didn't make sense, back on the shelf it went.

Of course, those construction lines weren't a real problem. They were meant to be a framework for later lines. The later lines would be inked and after the ink dried, the construction lines could be erased. The problem was that I did not know that and the text did not explain that right off. So, to me, not aware of the sequence of events, it looked like so much nonsense. Had there been even a short summary of procedure right off, the results might have been a bit different.

It's not just books on drawing that have this problem. When I first looked at electronics, at the very basic part, there were endless exercises using groups of resistors. These don't seem to do much. They limit current. They generate heat. But they're not exactly exciting and a circuit of a battery and a bunch of resistors just seems wasteful. It wasn't until I read a book my grandfather had given me that I got something of an explanation. It brought up the question I had, "Why all this fuss with resistors?" and answered it by saying they represented loading, and were just easier to consider than, say, motors or lights and the more interesting would be coming along soon enough. Elements of Radio started off differently and introduced each new component as a need for it was explained. This made even more sense.

I am not blaming the flaws of one book for my not drawing things. Had I been as determined about that as I had been about other things, one poorly explained text would not have mattered. It's just an example that getting into the fiddly details of how to do something, without explaining the why, can cause confusion and with it a loss of interest.