[jkoudys]

Many have covered specific learning material, but my best advice is to find a mentor. It really is a skill that's best learned by apprenticing. I new a lot of concepts and could muddle my way through them, but it wasn't until I had experienced people to work under directly that my skills really took off.

Just like the best advice on learning to write code is to write code, the best way to learn how to optimize performance is to optimize performance.