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Anyone that offers a "beginner to pro" course for a language is full of shit. You do not reach pro status by learning a language. That's the absolute first step, and you will still be a beginner after learning your first language. Also I think most programmers that already know at least one language would consider learning a language via video tutorial to be a massive waste of time.
Had to google it, but those books do actually exist!! I am totally getting them as a decoration on my desk at work.
JavaScript is like C, you can learn close to the entire (useful) featureset in under an hour, but for some reason people like to say it's complicated or hard to learn (dates notwithstanding because the way dates work in JS is stupid)
i got into programming to make games: i thought i'll learn c# in 1-2 hours by watching a crash course.
it's been more than 5 years and i still know no shit about programming.💀
So much of programming isn't about learning "programming", its about learning how to efficiently implement and deploy existing libraries to fulfill some complex function.
The actual bare bones of C# are something you probably could wrap your brain around inside a week or two of cramming. But simply knowing what encapsulation or inheritance is won't give you the savvy to know when it makes sense to build an interface or add a layer of abstraction. Just like knowing the basics of SQL won't tell you the best way to collect, store, query, sort, and process a particular complex data set.
I know nothing but my recommendation if your motivation is making games: check Game Jams. They tend to have clever people coming with fun ideas and developing them in a short time, so IMO it's a great way of learning the trade.
As an example, check https://itch.io/jams and filter by "participants" and "featured" to get more mainstream, less adventurous ideas.
Some game jams that include source code: https://www.brutalhack.com/blog/open-sourcing-9-game-jam-projects/
Finally, I see casual* game development in two different ways:
If you're on the second case, I'll recommend getting into Godot or Unity, as they take away a lot of the hard parts in game development while sacrificing some flexibility. There are plenty of options out there beyond these two, but they tend to be the most popular ones for casual* game development.
*Anything beyond casual is beyond anything I know
If you're curious why, YouTube caps the duration to 12 hours and filesize to 256gb for verified accounts.
I mean, unless we define "professional" as really just being able to collect money for it, that still seems extremely short, even if it were a dozen parts with that length...
As a non-professional casual programmer I feel this. I can have moments in my life where I'm creating some incredible stuff for myself for work or things at home. Then there's periods of inactivity where I don't use the language. Go back later to add something, do something new, or fix a problem... and now I'm Googling again how the hell to do something that I used to know well. It's like speaking languages, you have to keep up with it or the neurons lose their connections. Usually some of it comes back once I start digging in, but I hate having to relearning stuff. Getting older with memory lapses doesn't help either.
Reading and writing programming syntax uses the same areas of the brain that handle language. Knowing a programming language is very much a skill that erodes quickly when not used
Same. Feel like I really gotta create a small library with examples of different stuff for each language I use.
I already have that. It's the old code, and I always find myself looking back to pull snippets because I don't remember how my genius in the past did it. But that's how you're supposed to do it anyway, right? Why reinvent the wheel.
Yeah, when I'm well in training with a language, there's certainly a magnitude more stuff that I know off the top of my head, but what really makes the difference is that I know where to look up how to do something and what libraries to pull in.
You don't need to remember everything to the point, where you could reproduce it without looking anything up. It's much more important to have a pattern in your head, so that when you do look things up, you can piece back together how it worked from that information you find online.