The Node-RED User's Guide helped me get started as a beginner on a few experimental flows of my own, slowly venturing beyond the comfort of JavaScript functions. But it was a constant process of going back and forth between my flow (which is not working) and the user's guide to understand what I was doing wrong. I had fully expected this and, as far as beginner learning curves go, Node-RED is not bad.

On the Node-RED Documentation page, a peer of the User's Guide is the Cookbook. I thought its subtitle "Recipes to help you get things done with Node-RED" was promising, but as a beginner I could not make use of it. It listed some common tasks and how to perform those tasks, but they were described in Node-RED terminology ('message' 'flow') which I as a beginner had yet to grasp. I couldn't use the recipes when I didn't even understand the description of the result.

Continuing the food preparation analogy: If I didn't understand what "Beef Wellington" was, I wouldn't know if I wanted to cook it, or be able to find the recipe in the book.

So to make use of the Node-RED cookbook, I had to first understand what the terms mean. Not just the formal definition, but actually seeing them in practice and trying to use them a few times on my own. After a few hours of Node-RED exploration I reached that point, and the Node-RED cookbook became a powerful resource.

I don't know how the Node-RED Cookbook could make this any easier. It's the kind of thing that was opaque to me as a beginner, but once I understood, everything looks easily obvious in hindsight. I stare at the cookbook descriptions now, and I don't understand how I couldn't comprehend the same words just a few days ago. I wish I could articulate something useful and contribute to help the next wave of beginners, because that would be amazing. But for now I can only be the beginner, consuming existing content like a Best Practices guide.