Have you tried LFS? You can copy and paste, but you have to read the commands and figure out what they're doing.
This will give you an overall theoretical idea of how things are laid out - but you have to realise that every new version of something, there's some developer somewhere who wants to exercise their creativity and make something really clever and cool (to them), so it probably won't make any sense to you after the upgrade. That's the point you realise you're on the eternal treadmill of trying to keep your system doing what you need it to do, without freezing in the vulnerabilities.
This will give you an overall theoretical idea of how things are laid out - but you have to realise that every new version of something, there's some developer somewhere who wants to exercise their creativity and make something really clever and cool (to them), so it probably won't make any sense to you after the upgrade. That's the point you realise you're on the eternal treadmill of trying to keep your system doing what you need it to do, without freezing in the vulnerabilities.