Ask HM: Facebook's “The Hacker Way” ... coding style?

I'm pretty sure that you have heard a lot about Facebook's The Hacker Way recently. I'm really interested to know how we can deploy this approach in action, when we are "coding". Actually, I know that my style is way different from this method. Mark says :

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete.

Alright ... So how do you attack a problem that you have never heard of?

For example, You are supposed to learn Django or RoR framework from scratch. By this way, one should read "proper tutorials", "implement" the sample codes and refers to main documentation until he/she can write them by his heart. Am I right?

As you can imaging, it's very different reading 800 pages books on just one technology (Hibernate, for instance). Is it your style of learning? If so, what do you think of it ?