This won't solve all your problems, but it _can_ be a big help to know what to search when you see a wall of symbols, and detexify.kirelabs.org is a decent reso

This won't solve all your problems, but it _can_ be a big help to know what to search when you see a wall of symbols, and detexify.kirelabs.org is a decent resource for that -- you can draw a single symbol and get the latex code that would generate it. (if you're typesetting math it's invaluable, not just decent)