This was me as well. I had tried several resources and books (including LYAH) and while I had enjoyed them, they hadn't seemed to "stick." I can't recall now where I saw Conrad Barski's tutorial [0] mentioned, perhaps here on HN, but I found his approach much more personally suitable.
He steps the reader through writing a program that reads in and then divides an arbitrary park map into small, roughly equivalent picnic plots with colored SVG output along the way. The code takes center stage and is presented to the reader with the why and a good/bad analysis afterward.
I'm not sure whether this is what you're after, but at the very least it's worth a glance.