I was learning manim today and realized a very productive learning method.

First read and understand the quickstart guide for the basics.

Then use the examples as exercises. Find an interesting example, then implement it from scratch without looking at the source, then look at the source after. This has a number of advantages

1. You don't have to be creative while learning manim. Doing both at once is too hard, it's best to reimplement things to gain proficiency before you embark on creating new things.
2. You get to look at the example code after you're done

A few other tips

• Use goto definition on the manim source code! manim has a ton of helper methods which are quite trivial, reading them helped me understand manim a lot

I felt really productive learning this way, I think I'll do this again. The code for my manim things is here if you're interested.

I'm going try this for CSS too, reimplementing existing designs instead of trying to come up with good designs and implementing them at the same time.

Update: I tried with css, see here. The result was good, though I need to put more time into learning webdev (or not, math is kinda more important right now)