My method of learning a new anything is to jump in and surround myself with information, reading everything I can get my hands on, but not too deeply. I find this way I can kind of get my arms around whatever it is I’m trying to learn, trace the outlines and find the boundaries. Then I can go into specifics with some focus.
With most open source projects this means one of the first steps subscribing to the general '-user' mailing list. Struts is no different, but I wasn't prepared for the traffic. I subscribed before leaving work yesterday evening and by the time I arrived at work today I had 60+ messages from the list. Ouch! I like a lot of information, but this hose is blasting with too much pressure.
At least it gave me an excuse to finally learn some sieve rules...