First off, understanding the different data structure from a high level is mandatory. I would understand the difference between a dataframe, series, and index are. Further, learn how numpy's ndarrays play a role.

From there, unfortunately, I had to learn by doing...or rather struggling. It was one question at a time to stack overflow, like "how to filter on a column in pandas". Maybe in the modern era of LLMs, this part might be easier. And eventually, I learned some patterns and internalized the data structures.