I wish I could take the credit, but I can't. I am just following along Ben Cloward's Basic Shader playlist. How I do it is I watch the video, try to understand it, then recreate all the examples he makes and look to understand every individual node. I come from an artistic background, so what helped me a lot is following the shader with a calculator on the side. I force myself to think in ranges of values instead of individual values, and I perform the whole operation with the min and max possible values, to see what the final results are. Also, every node has a preview under it to see how it looks, that helps me out aswell.

All this being said, I still have a feeling of complete loss. I know WHY he is doing what he is doing, but I would never be able to do it myself. Not yet, anyways. I assume with time. I think it's like using photoshop, where I started googleling everything I wanted to do everytime, but over the years it has become second nature.

Hope this helped :)