I never intended to, but this approach has helped me tremendously by accident. First off, reading code is kinda boring, and if you don't know everything about

I never intended to, but this approach has helped me tremendously by accident. First off, reading code is kinda boring, and if you don't know everything about a language, it can be easy to get stuck in a spot and not know where the code goes next. What I did was configure a debugger. I do Ruby, Objective-C and PHP work, and all three languages have excellent debugging support (rdebug, gdb and xdebug, respectfully). Configure your IDE/editor to hook into the debugger of choice for your language of choice, and for something as simple as figuring out what a variable holds without having to litter your code with errant puts/echo/printf statements, set a breakpoint and run your code. Step through the program one step at a time, and you'll easily see how your request to do X also makes your program do A, F, G, and Z through the framework or libraries you are using. Plus, learning how to use a debugger will be a tremendous boon to your skillset.