While many ask questions about where to find good books or tutorials, I'd like to take the opposite tack.

I consider myself to be an entry-level programmer ready to move up to mid-level. I have written code in c, c++, c#, perl, python, clojure, vb, and java, so I'm not completely clueless.

Where I see a problem in moving to the next level is learning to make better use of the literally hundreds upon hundreds of libraries available out there.

I seem paralyzed unless there is a specific example in a book or tutorial to hand-hold me, yet I often read in various forums where another programmer attempts to assist with a question. He/she will look through the docs or scan the available classes/methods in their favorite IDE and seem to grok what's going on in a relatively short period of time, even if they had no previous experience with that specific library or function.

I yearn to break the umbilical chord of constantly spending hour upon hour searching and reading, searching and reading, searching and reading. Many times there is no book or tutorial, or if there is, the discussion glosses over my specific needs or the examples shown are too far off the path for the usage I had in mind or the information is outdated and makes use of deprecated components or the library itself has fallen out of mainstream, yet is still perfectly usable (but no docs, books, or tutorials to hand-hold).

My question is: In the absence of books or tutorials, what is the best way to grok new or unfamiliar libraries?

I yearn to slicken the grok path so I can get down to the business of doing what I love most -- coding.