I find the procedural course extremely confusing.  I feel as if I missed an introductory course that explains the workings of these nodes.   Example:  "simply plug the color output into the value input and multiply to get a number for a rotation".     What does the color output look like and what does a Value input look for and do?   It appears to multiply by 180 so the color values must be less than one.  In researching this I find that Blender is converting color information to grayscale.  That is not really intuitive.  This is just one example. Have I missed a class that could help?