During Flex programming, I recently ran into several questions (about box models, ways to join lines and misaligning pixels [on doctype]) regarding computer graphics and layout, where I felt that I lacked some basic background on things like

• concepts like the box model
• approaches mapping real numbers to a pixel raster (like font anti-aliasing)
• conventions found across drawing engines, like do you count y coordinates from top or bottom, and why

I feel that reading some basic Wikipedia articles, books or tutorials on these subjects might help in phrasing my questions more specifically and debugging my code more systematically. I have repeatedly found myself writing tiny test apps in Flex, just to find out how the APIs do very basic stuff. My assumption would be that if I knew the right vocabulary and some general concepts, I could solve these questions much faster.