I think good first resource would be the book and lecture notes in an introductory university course treating the specific domain you are interested in because

I think good first resource would be the book and lecture notes in an introductory university course treating the specific domain you are interested in because often lots of things in notation are domain specific. Lots of good open university lectures out there, if not sure from where to start the MIT open courseware used to be a good first guess for accessing materials. As a sidenote I have MSc in Physics with a good dollop of maths involved and I am quite clueless when looking at a new domain so it's not as if university degree in non-related subject would be of any help...