In reply to barni.

That's definitely the way to do it. :) Identifying specific problems that you need to solve, then digging into the tutorials and documentation to learn the methods to solve the problem, is how I've come as far as I have.

Case in point: There's a plugin I want to build to address a specific content authoring problem I'm constantly running into. Nothing's out there right now that addresses it, so I'm slowly tackling it myself.