Node-RED beginners like myself are given some hand-holding through two tutorials, creatively titled Creating Your First Flow and Creating Your Second Flow. After that, we are dropped into the User's Guide for more information. The Using Node-RED section of that page covers fundamentals to get up to speed on how to work in a Node-RED project. Within that section, the page I found most instructive and informative is Using the Function Node.

Part of this might just be familiarity. A function node is a node that encapsulates a JavaScript function for doing whatever the author can write JavaScript to do. Because I'm familiar with languages like C and Python, I'm comfortable with the mentality of writing functions in source code to do what I have in mind. So seeing the function node and all I can do within it is comforting, like seeing a familiar face in a new crowd.

And just as in real life, there will be some level of temptation to stay in the comfort zone. It is probably possible to write any Node-RED program with just three nodes: an input node, a single Function node with a lot of JavaScript code, and an output node.

But writing all my logic in a single JavaScript function node would be ignoring the power of the platform. Flows allows me to lay out my program not in terms of functions calling one another, but in terms of messages flowing from one node to the next. Each node is an encapsulated representation of a feature, and each message is a piece of information that was generated from one node to inform another node on what to do next.

This is a different mentality, and it'll probably take a bit of practice for me to rearrange my thinking to take advantage of the power of the platform. But while that transition is taking place, I expect to get occasionally stuck. But I know I can unblock myself by resorting to little pieces of JavaScript programming inside a big data flow program, and that's a good confidence builder for me to proceed building some hands-on experience with Node-RED. I needed that experience before I could understand additional Node-RED resources like the Cookbook.