Comment Take a look, it's in a book (Score 1) 515
Read a book. A bunch of books, really. For me, first a C++ book in HS. Then many more in college. You see, if you need to master a language, you research the top 2 or 3 books for said language, then read them all cover to cover, spend several thousand hours coding in that language, and then you'll start to be proficient.
Copy/Paste programmers are a lower breed in my view. When I conduct interviews and ask any sort of question about bit manipulation, it's staggering to see how few "Senior/Principal" engineers can't recall how many bits are in a byte, or how much space their data structure will consume.
Perhaps these are tradesmen, however? Does the pipe fitter understand hydrodynamics, or how exactly his lathe cuts threads into a pipe? No, he just knows how to measure, cut, and install pipes. There is a use for those who grok and those who just build, but I hate seeing the moniker "Senior Software Engineer" applied to people who have just copied and pasted code for a few years, as they don't understand the 'why' of the system at lower levels.