[aethos]

While this is a decent guide, I find that being skillful in latex comes from memorizing many highly specific commands. I spend most of my time googling for things such as "How to use (a), (b), (c) for enumerating lists".

[clishem]

To answer your example question:

    \usepackage[shortlabels]{enumitem}

Then you can simply use:

    \begin{enumerate}[(a)]
      \item The first item
      \item The second item
      \item The third etc 
    \end{enumerate}

Other label types are very intuitive this way.

I could have pulled this from an old document I made, no memorizing neccesary. It is also very easy to find using a search engine, as I did in this case: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/208696/using-enumera...

[tomcam]

...but this article is giving me the context I need to understand the Google results

[chairmanwow]

True enough. But I agree with OP in that being "good" with LaTeX is essentially just memorizing lots of commands. I've never written a document without having to constantly search for specific commands.

[Pitarou]

Have you tried using LyX? Or does LyX not really support the kind of things you want to do?