I am a bit confused to be honest..

It find it really hard to learn Houdini because there seem to be only two types of tutorials.
The ones that barely scratch the surface and the ones where I have to pause and fire up google, etc. every 20 seconds to find information on something the tutor just used/did.

For example: I watched a tutorial where the tutor used the attribute wrangle node (he always calls it the attrib wrangle SOP)
And he uses stuff like @ptnum a LOT!

So I was searching the internet about some kind of explanation or details on variables one can use. Didn't find anything on a @ptnum except it is used all the time. It would be nice if someone could point me in the right direction on where to find something like a VEX and Wrangle vocabular.
Also.. I know Surface Operators are called SOPs, right?
What is confusing to me as someone new to houdini (used C4D and Maya in the past) is all the ( I guess) old and new acronyms that get thrown around and sometimes a SOP means a Node Operator like a Wrangle or a XFORM (which is called transform now!?) and other times it is used for the hirarchy level …
so again, please someone explain this or point me in the right direction of where I can find more information on those basics because I am kind of lost.

Hi
Check out these two pages in the docs:
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.0/vex/snippets#attributes [sidefx.com]
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.0/ref/expression_cookbook [sidefx.com]

I would also recomend this vex resource:
http://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=HoudiniVex [tokeru.com]

-b

Here is a tutorial Playlist I made where I try to teach houdini in a way that helps understand the application paradigms a bit better

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjOCJrhSBGUG9uqJ2rMe6ByLJcTD9Jau7&app=desktop [youtube.com]

This is also mostly focused on procedural content creation and games. Given that I also have a background in Maya, I try to also bridge the concepts a bit

Hope it helps!