Map, Filter, Reduce Those are the big three for data. More important than those however is mindset and patience with oneself. Writing code that works is the first and most impressive step. Optimizations are fun to think about but unless your computations are sluggish and repeat a lot of unnecessary steps they are rarely a priority.
Build something and shelf it. Trust me, in but a few months you will look back in bewilderment and realize how much you've grown.
I was thinking about caches and evaluating what calculations I want to do.
I fixed a project for someone simulating a machine. That took them almost 9 minutes. Simply replacing the part where they initialised a solver and used it to find a zeropoint of a quadratic function with a call to that initialiser got it down to a minute.
You should have seen their faces when we put the quadratic formula in and it took 28 seconds.