The big thing for me has always been learning the vocabulary and just how to get through the documentation. In fact I was chatting to some other programmers awhile back about this and they were saying half the skill in programming is just learning how to read the documentation generally.
Once I knew about UV shells and sewing UV's etc. the tutorials started flooding in, it keeps happening with every subject I come across.
Oh yeah very true, opens the door for so much more!