@b0rk I personally found that doing a complete read of the manpage of a new tool gives me a fairly good idea of what sort of problem the authors wanted to solve, even if I don't recall specific parameters later. Also whenever i run into a weird command somewhere, I look up what all the flags do, both to understand the subtleties and to "prime the cache", so to speak.
Also-also, at least on Debian, a _lot_ of things have manpages, like file formats or some helper scripts. And they have neat references to one another at the end. It's basically a proto-web.