This title is the best advice I can give to anyone: If you don’t understand something, simulate/reproduce it.
That’s how I learned most of the things I know. I have studied computer network on the books, but I have started to really understand it when I started reading the content of all the packets running through my network card, and when I wrote my own (minimal) TCP implementation, and when I played with a much larger TCP implementation.
This is just one simple example, but it can be applied to anything. I strongly believe that trying to clone software or digging into how a system work is the only way to really understand something, and this article is a clear example: Do you want to know how a CPU work? Simulate one!
This article describes a bit how the implementation works, if you want to know more you can read the code or implement it your own. Actually, this article added me even more curiosity to start implementing my own CPU :-).