IME, the most important key to Latex is setting up your environment so you can have a fast turnaround time between writing some markup and seeing what it looks like (essentially, getting a "Latex REPL"). There are a bunch of different ways to do this, you'll have to pick what's best for you. On Macs I tend to use Sublime Text (substitute with your editor of choice) with a macro to invoke pdfTeX; on Windows I use TeXstudio which has live preview support. There are other ways; do whatever's best for you.

The second most important thing I've found for latex is setting up macros. In TextExpander/AHK I have several dozen Latex macros set up, like

  \tbl3 => \begin{tabular}{ l | c | r }
             a & b & c \\
           \end{tabular}

With a bunch of variants for different styles (full borders, etc.), column numbers, etc. Once your macros have become muscle memory, writing Latex speeds up considerably.