Is Étude a Whole Game?

I am reading the David Perkins's book Making Learning Whole today. Chapter 3 of this book focuses on how to work on the hard parts of learning. According to Perkins, the learners definitely need to pick out the hard parts in the whole learning game (Perkins' opinion is that learning shouldn't just learn the elements without knowing their usage, nor should it be only "about" something without really practice it in person, learning should be like playing a whole game, at least a junior version of a whole game.) to practice and practice and practice, but this oftentimes is not fun at all. How to making learning the hard parts fun? Perkins suggests to make exercise into Études. While I agree with this, I also think how to use études also matters a lot.

Recall my experience of learning playing piano, I did play a lot of études from Bayer, Carl Czerny, Hanon,etc, but I didn't feel it was fun or useful at all, nor did I have any concept of the whole game. The way suggested by Perkins is that when the learners playing the whole game, there are some hard parts, and an ideal way to practice the hard parts is to use études, in order to play the whole game better. But when I was learning to play the piano, almost all we did is playing the études, and had no ideas how these études could fit into the whole game. This is a misuse of the études as elements without knowing the whole game. So, the situation turns to that we always play the hard parts: Bayer, then Czerny-1, Czerny-2,Czerny-3...harder and harder... If the learning game is all about the hard parts, then it's too hard for the learners to enjoy.   

Another of my thought triggered by this book chapter is that I begin to ask whether I am playing the whole game when I am learning the PHP programming now? It seems I got some small tasks to practice on, so I am definitely playing the junior version of the whole game. However, I feel I do not know the elements, so oftentimes, I feel I don't know how to play the game, I basically have nothing to use when I am playing. I lack of the fundamental knowledge of how computer system works, I don't know the Bash commands, I don't know the DOS commands, I don't even know HTML, how could I learn PHP well? Although I did wrote some codes that have the required functions, but I deeply doubt whether it's efficient or bug free, and I have no ways or no time to deeply examine that, all I want is to finish the game. So my opinion is that before we play the whole game, we at least need some elements and some "about". This is just a half-cooked opinion, I am still not sure about it. Maybe it's just the residual effect of the "element" and "about" education I received. Also maybe it's just because of the age: I am just paranoid by the fact that lots of excellent programmers are much younger than me, and I starts to learn this too late to enjoy it without worrying about anything.