I usually try to find the perfect book. I will buy ~3 books that look the most promising on a topic, and one will usually end up being it. I like books for this because they require obsession to write well and I'll inherit some of that obsession.

If you're studying something that's "cutting edge," often the best you can do in terms of books is to find what inspired the cutting edge. And those influences are best found by getting obsessed with key people working on the cutting edge stuff and figuring out what influenced them. Often, it's not the prior cutting edge thing that influenced them. Instead, it is usually something far more abstract or seemingly unrelated - which tends be more informative anyway. My goal would be to shadow their experience/learning so that I could interpret the present moment as they would.

If you're better with people than I am, you can probably do better than books. I'd find someone that understands the cutting edge and get them to help me understand it too. I'd also move physically closer to, or visit frequently, the places where people working on the cutting edge are densest. An osmosis tends to happen.