I have started bonsai-ing to some degree. Every time I repot, I prune the tree and literally saw off the bottom third or so of the rootball and plant it into a wider-but-shallower pot. I have a 2year old habanero growing in a pie pan, and citrus and guavas in similarly proportioned containers (though larger, ~2ft diameter, 4" deep).
I haven't done much with jaboticabas because I want to get them to fruiting stage, but I guess you could cut them back once they reach it and still make a rather small bonsai, and slowly flatten the rootball like I was suggesting above. I don't know what time of year is optimal, I do it whenever they look unbalanced for their container.
The books I've read on bonsai seemed mainly focused on tree selection and aesthetic stuff like root flare and wiring the limbs to be curvy. I don't feel like I got much out of them. I use the same soil as I do for normal containers, and I'm not interested in plucking leaves for photo shoots.
The most non-obvious part of bonsai I learned is that typically a tree is initially grown out to much larger than its planned bonsai size, and then pruned severely and shaped from then on. Cheating in a sense, but the end result seems the same in a much shorter time.