"what I need to know to build and piece together code"

Tough question to answer, this could mean several different things. It may be that you need to practice splitting up your code into well-defined units. This is done on several levels, but basically you should really try to have functions that do one specific thing, and classes that have some real-world meaning to them. This is vague, I know, but a good way to help you do it properly is to come up with good names for variables, functions, classes, filenames, etc. That way, instead of having "app.js" that contains 100% of the code for your project, you would have "helper.js", "main-page.js", "service.js", "model.js", etc. Instead of having function func1 which loads client data from a database, extracts some information from it, and displays it to the user in a textbox, split that up into 3 different functions which each do that thing only. I think if you practice this, it will become more clear how the pieces fit together, because the pieces will have sharp and well-defined edges, instead of being fuzzy and overlapping :D