Mandelbrot 101?

[noanunoans]

Thank you, all those who have made a wealth of information available on this site and elsewhere.  A humble salute, to all those who have created extraordinary Mandelbrots.

After spending many hours exploring with Mandelbrot 3D, YouTube, Wikipedia, and other sources, this newbie can formulate, rotate, zoom, colour, size, save and print a simple image.  But what about real artistic creativity, such as that shown in the galleries?  None.  And very little idea of what skills are needed, and how to obtain them.   As laser blaster wrote on March 15 (about raymarching):  "there aren't a lot of good resources for a complete newbie looking to understand everything."

It is very generous of authors to produce fractal tutorials, taking time to give away their hard-earned knowledge to a small audience.  So perhaps the best that a newbie can hope for is a kind of "freshers first year reading list", a "Mandelbrot 4 Dummies", a sequence of learning materials from different sources that will lead to a sound understanding of theory and practice.   If you have any suggestions (from a single excellent item to - dream on, you say! - an entire sequence), I'd be very grateful for them.

[cKleinhuis]

that would be nice, why not documenting your learning curve, for getting creative an understanding of hybrid mechanics may be of great help, check out a speech of mine here:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/L-YTY014Zqo&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/v/L-YTY014Zqo&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>