As a professional developer I can tell you that I have a few strategies for addressing this situation, which work for me:
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Read the Classes.
Yes: Read The Code.
The Code IS Documentation.
The JUCE (and Tracktion) framework codebase is pretty easy to navigate. It would take a week for a newbie to get through reading the classes, class by class, and getting a feel for what they do.
Take notes, make your own bread-crumb trail through things, but whatever you do: make the time, and take the time, to read the code.
Bonus points if you make a fork and add your own comments as you do this, over a week or two, so that it can be easily shared with others. -
awesome-juce. This is such an excellent resource, I have a script for setting it up on all of my JUCE development workstations, and I use sudara’s cut trick[1] (s/echo/git clone/) to clone every single repo in the list.
Yes, really. I clone every single repo in the awesome-juce list, and then I READ THAT CODE TOO.
Then I set up my editor to parse this massive archive of existing Open-Source projects, and any time I encounter an issue with a JUCE/Tracktion class, I check the repos. More often than not, I find good practices - or, at the very least, examples from others who have already worked things out a bit. -
Join the Discord, and find other JUCE coders to discuss things in realtime.
Many times, you will find an enthusiastic colleague who might spend a few minutes with you, if you lure their eyeballs into the chat with a well-worded, balanced and interesting question about any particular subject. Please note, this will be far, far more effective as a strategy if you do #1/#2 above, first, stringently. -
If you’re still stuck, formulate a decent post to the forum, sit back and wait.
The JUCE Devs have detectors for when all of the above have been done, and are more than likely going to respond with enthusiasm to help you under those conditions.
[1] - Awesome JUCE: A list of open source libraries, modules, plugins, utilities - #16 by sudara