I used to buy books to learn things back in the 90's, when docs were hard to find. Now I find that the best docs are not written books, but online documentatio

I used to buy books to learn things back in the 90's, when docs were hard to find. Now I find that the best docs are not written books, but online documentation. These days I'd say just play with it. Build an app. Start up the one box openstack devstack. People have gone through a lot of pains to make a simple dev environment work for a lot of different languages/platforms. Once I get into it, it's less of an abstract idea, and more trying to do something. Having a toy project in mind also helps to build something useful. Over time, your knowledge will simply accrete.