Some swear by Nix pills https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills, but I only got to reading the relevant parts of them when I was making my own distro.
In general, poking matters much more because NixOS world is much more Lego than the now-fossilized last-century Linux one, meaning that you get much more freedom/incentive to do weird things that noone tried before, so there are fewer restrictive patterns you need to learn before you inevitably break them. If you think I've just described Windows->Linux, no, I'm describing Linux->NixOS.
@cujo
#1 is definitely skimming the original https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf
#2 is bookmarking https://github.com/tazjin/nix-1p and going poking
#3 the holy trinity of nix/nixpkgs/nixos manuals at https://nixos.org/learn which are also the reference kind of materials, not top-to-bottom bedside reading
Some swear by Nix pills https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills, but I only got to reading the relevant parts of them when I was making my own distro.
In general, poking matters much more because NixOS world is much more Lego than the now-fossilized last-century Linux one, meaning that you get much more freedom/incentive to do weird things that noone tried before, so there are fewer restrictive patterns you need to learn before you inevitably break them. If you think I've just described Windows->Linux, no, I'm describing Linux->NixOS.