With respect to beginning to study the history of philosophy, I think that it is almost always more interesting and rewarding to engage with primary philosophical texts without consulting commentaries and other secondary sources: direct intellectual contact with the most poweful philosophers and philospohical arguments is a profoundly powerful experience.You are right of course, that this is a difficult experience to secure, but the effort is almost always worth it. Patience is important. Reading even the most abstruse philosophical texts becomes much esaier with practice; my general advice is to stick with the primary texts with a good degree of patience and confdence that you will become capable of more and more sophisticated engagement over time.

I know that it is tempting to "turn to" secondary source when you confront a difficult and frustrating text. If you are a student who will be learning along with classmates and can gain additional insight from a professor, I urge you to resist this temptation -- instead, use those other people as resources to support your learning and engagement with the primary texts. For those reading entirely on their own, it might sometimes be useful to consult sparingly in the secondary literature as a means of academic support, but even those who will never take a philosophy class should use this assistance as sparingly as possible.

To be sure, there are many marvelous commentaries and secondary sources, and many which have indpendent philosophical interest. As your studies advance it makes sense to consult those texts when you wish to study a particular topic or argument in depth. I would only do this, however, after you have read fairly widely on your own among the philosophcal canon.

Outside the history of philosophy, the the distinction between primary and secondary texts is much less clear, so the "read the author first and her critics later" strategy probably doesn't make much sense there. Indeed, one should not push the distinction too hard even within the history of philosophers: although I think it is useful to read the canonical authors "on their own," keep in mind that many of those canonical texts included criticism of past philosophers and as you read those authors you will probably begin placing their individual texts and arguments in an historical context.