[thoughtFrame]

As you can see in the other replies, there are many paths that lead to reverse engineering, but I feel like the best way to make the concepts stick is to have "reverse engineer X" be a problem standing in your way (where X is a piece of software, a protocol, etc.) When you have that problem and you need to solve it, you have a target to throw all the "darts" those tutorials give you, and this will probably be more effective than just reading the material and hoping you'll use some of it in the future.