Indispensible:
http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~clark/nordmod ... k_toc.html - the modules look a bit different, but it must be the most complete all-in-one modular handbook ever written. I even printed the whole bunch to paper.
On a second note, once you have some basic understanding: lots of insight came to me when I just had no idea what I was doing. Like mentioned before, experiment.
Thirdly, cooperate. If you have the chance, organise a meeting with other patchers. This goes for the whole Scope platform, you have no idea what you're missing out on which is obvious to the other, and vice versa. If no Scoper lives near you, playing with other people's patches and using these as scratchpads for your own patches will bring you more insight in their techniques.
Finally, a patch is never static. It's not like a hardwired device, the whole point of modular is the flexibility to tune it exactly to what you need at the moment. Save your patches with the project in a folder, and save consecutive versions with different names, maybe linked to your project versions naming system.
Have fun!!
at0m.