i've always considered manpages to be sort of part of the unix command line experience. since they're fast, it's no matter.
but yea, it took me many years to wire down ln's target link_name semantics for some reason.
what helped for me was to reason about the single argument form. ln -s ~/opt/junk/bin/thinger creates a link to thinger in the current directory. this single argument form is easy to remember, if you want to create a link of course you have to specify the name of the target (from which the link name will be inferred) and since it's the only argument it has to be the first one. now if you want to give it a different name, put the name in obvious still open place, the second argument.
Funny, I always reason about the 3+ argument form... For example, what does ln -s foo bar baz do? Well it can't create a foo symlink that points to bar AND baz, but it could create multiple symlinks - bar and baz - that point to the file foo. Therefore the first arg is the file you want to point to, and the rest of the arguments are symlinks you want to create (of which there happens to usually only be one).
Edit: this line of reasoning works for common usage of a lot of other utils too, like zip/tar etc. Even grep - is it grep FILE PATTERN [PATTERN ...] or grep PATTERN FILE [FILE ...] ?
but yea, it took me many years to wire down ln's target link_name semantics for some reason.
what helped for me was to reason about the single argument form. ln -s ~/opt/junk/bin/thinger creates a link to thinger in the current directory. this single argument form is easy to remember, if you want to create a link of course you have to specify the name of the target (from which the link name will be inferred) and since it's the only argument it has to be the first one. now if you want to give it a different name, put the name in obvious still open place, the second argument.