I too learned a lot at first just by reading some of the many example sketches in the Arduino files/example menu. Once you understand the individual functions then it's a matter of planning how you will combine them into one sketch. The key is to understand the basic structure of a sketch. The Arduino defines two sections, the void setup() function and the void loop() functions. You place all the things that only need to be defined or executed once into the setup function. Everything else goes into the loop function. The loop function never ends, if and when it gets to the last statement of the loop it just jumps back to the first statement of the loop.
That help at all?
Lefty