I'm closer to your way. First, pick up a shit-ton of books. Or o'reilly safari. Use it to quickly scan for good tools, in combination with GitHub. Then, ind

I'm closer to your way. First, pick up a shit-ton of books. Or o'reilly safari. Use it to quickly scan for good tools, in combination with GitHub. Then, index the book. That is, read the most relevant chapters lightly, but read the source code closely. Make sure all the source makes sense. If it does, you're in great shape. If not, either the author is poor or you've gotta page-in back references. Then, start hacking together code. Page-fault on the book (and others like it, including example source).