Ext JS - How to Mute Syntax

I needed to figure out how to get the value of the field in my form from the handler function, but I did not know how to refer to the field and continue to receive errors. I spent time learning APIs, code examples and googling. Finally, I found one example that works (I think there are others).

Assuming a form named MyForm and a field 'myField'

var myVal = myForm.getForm().findField("myField").getValue();

Maybe I'm just too new to this, but I don't think this is clear from looking at the API docs. So my question is when you are trying to understand what your approach is.

Thank!