But now that I think more about it, doing both at once helped me with how I generally learn things, which is: copy example applications and go through the motions, and slowly experiment/break things until it all makes sense.
However, the problem with this is that if you kind-of-know something, you just mindlessly retype the code without getting much benefit. I kind-of-know MVC (or whatever Angular is) frameworks so to make things a challenge, I took the Todo/Hello-world Angular apps and re-wrote them in CoffeeScript. There was enough mental exercise there that my brain didn't atrophy from looking at Todo/Hello-world-level code, and at the same time, I got some practice with CoffeeScript.
I guess the main "resource" that made this possible was with Yeoman, which chirped at me everytime I screwed up in CoffeeScript (i.e. missed a whitespace) and made it easy, via TDD, to slowly construct an Angular app despite being incredibly confused with some of Angular's magic.