I'm on my second time (: . Do you have links to the resources that you mention?
> The CSS specifications are surprisingly user-friendly! I learned a ton reading the [Flexbox spec](https://www.w3.org/TR/css-flexbox-1/).
The CSS specs are fairly intelligible (as specs go) and once you have enough base knowledge to get a foothold while reading them, they force you into thinking about CSS much more systematically, because that's how specs are written.