Man pages are not ideal for learning from. They were only intended for reference. Books, online tutorials, classes, etc. are much better, but sometimes you need to just have a go at doing something right now that you haven't learned about yet. If you can survive on the minimum of background info, the man pages are always right there. I call this learning by discovery.
Some people call it having problems.
It all depends on your attitude, whether you're willing to exploit the situation for what you can get out of it, and knowing how far you can afford to explore before stopping and asking for help becomes the most sensible next step. That's called learning by negligence, and is not a real good idea. Oh yes, we all have pretty good memories for the details of disasters, but people who call this a learning technique are kidding themselves. If you've really been learning you'll know exactly what you're doing before typing anything, which is a lot safer than simply following someone else's meaningless command recipe. Learn by discovery and the learning will stick much better than being told what to learn and when to learn it.