In my experience there's certainly advantages to be had in already having skills that are vaguely related to what you're trying to learn - a surprising number of techniques and principles are common across a very wide spectrum (try wet plastering a wall, then ice a cake with royal icing - the process, even in some of the details, is surprisingly similar) - and that then helps with cross-pollination of ideas.

That does come at a cost though - if you try to learn everything else before the thing you think you need to know, you'll never get there. Likewise some brief broad brush taster of other subjects might well not give you enough detail to be useful. Being able to tell in advance which other areas will happen to be useful to a particular area of interest can likely only be done with hindsight.

I reckon you might has well just read up on whatever takes your fancy, as well as what you need to do, and leave it to luck to find the synergies,

   - Andy.

In my experience there's certainly advantages to be had in already having skills that are vaguely related to what you're trying to learn - a surprising number of techniques and principles are common across a very wide spectrum (try wet plastering a wall, then ice a cake with royal icing - the process, even in some of the details, is surprisingly similar) - and that then helps with cross-pollination of ideas.

That does come at a cost though - if you try to learn everything else before the thing you think you need to know, you'll never get there. Likewise some brief broad brush taster of other subjects might well not give you enough detail to be useful. Being able to tell in advance which other areas will happen to be useful to a particular area of interest can likely only be done with hindsight.

I reckon you might has well just read up on whatever takes your fancy, as well as what you need to do, and leave it to luck to find the synergies,

   - Andy.