Learn the class, not the individual drugs first. Understand the mechanism of one prototype drug per class deeply, and 80% of the class behaves the same way. The side effects and contraindications usually fall straight out of the mechanism, you don't memorize them separately, you predict them. A drug that blocks X will cause problems wherever X normally does its job. Once you think this way, pharm shrinks from thousands of facts to a few dozen mechanisms with predictable consequences. That mindset shift is everything.
