Oh yes. I need to have enough practical experience for me to be able to understand the concepts, and then I can come from the conceptual side and really nail things down. But without both I find myself blocked.

With Git it was reading Git from the Bottom Up that really made things click to me. But I had to actually use it a few times and see what it did before that article made any sense.

And now git is really really simple to me. (The data structures - the commands are still a clusterfuck.)