Yep +1 for playing along with DW. Heres what I did when I started playing with mods not long ago.
Heres my story:
So I had been a vanilla player since before the 1.0 release but it really didnt take me to long to get bored of it. I started looking for more ways to expand my minecraft game play and quickly ran on to this BuildCraft thing. At first I thought that it was some kind of stand alone game that was copying minecraft or something (Silly me) but I soon realized that you could actually add it to your minecraft game and then have pipes and ways to "make" diamonds. This was like the Ritz to me. Well I soon began to think hmm what else might there be that I could add to minecraft, well I pretty much just went to the MCF and looked through the entire mods section of the forums, I looked at just about mod that was out there and decided that I wanted to try just about everyone (no kidding I had like a list of 75 mods I wanted to try) Oh and keep in mind these were all 1.1 mods at the time so nothing nearly as fancy as thaumcraft or all the sparklies of forge that we have today. Any who, I finally got pretty much every mod I wanted installed (After what must have been a week of frustration because of not knowing what the heck I was doing). So I hope in minecraft load up the game and, holy cow! I had no idea what to do, where to start or anything. So I went to youtube and typed in "Modded Minecraft LP" And after going through half a dozen channels I found DW and thought you know it seems like he knows what hes doing Im gonna see what I can learn from this. Well After watching DW and finding out what mods he had installed I went and got everyone of those mods and nothing else. Quickly I began watching videos and within a few days I was caught up on his newly started 1.1 LP. So while waiting for his next video every day I would go and do what I knew should be done, Mine, chop trees, build a better house, and build a ton of machines and such and put them in a chest waiting for DW to introduce them. Well fast forward a few months and I had played with DW for his entire 1.1 season and had made 1 of everything that he had made (This way I would better understand how his contraptions worked) and I even went on to make a few other things that I had thought of just to try and expand my knowledge.
Fast forward to present day. Today I feel that I probably got just as good of a knowledge base of the mods as DW does. Im always on the leading edge of mods know because of watching DW and follows different forums such as here, and if there is ever something I don't understand then wiki for that certain mod is a ton simpler to look through when you already know a good deal about the mod.