Ask HN: How can a intermediate-beginner learn Unix/Linux and programming?

For context, this was ~2008. I got my first personal laptop in middle school the only way I could manage: buy a two and a half year old hand me down Toshiba from my uncle for $200. It was too slow to be updated to a new Windows OS and I couldn’t afford the license anyway. My neighbor, a govt. systems programmer, told me about Linux. I looked it up and found Ubuntu. I installed it and encountered all of the problems the parent comment described. I learned a _lot_ for a 13 year old thanks to a great deal of very patient people on IRC. I spent most of my time alternating between debugging audio drivers so I could listen to music and trying to get wine to work so I could play games. When things were really running well, I’d mess with fancy window managers. This resulted in a lot of broken 3D drivers. Although I’ll admit I was interested in the naughty stuff, I either wasn’t motivated enough or wasn’t dumb enough to try it. Without a doubt, I screwed things up weekly. But 99% of my problems came from sudo apt-get upgrade rather than some other source. On some level, it blows me away to hear stories of people intentionally borking things like this. Perhaps I did stuff like this, quietly fixed it, and then forgot about it. Alternatively,when people taught me dangerous commands, I guess they just did a good job of explaining why and how they were dangerous.

Regardless, even if most will eventually do the worst, isn’t it worth it? Perhaps not in the case of the server, but arguably even then one could (perhaps facetiously) just say that the sysadmin learned as much as the student. For me, one thing is certain. It made a huge impact on my future.

You can either reach out to some influencers and ask them to help them in their projects for free in exchange for receiving knowledge or you can head to some websites regarding the language you are planning to run.

My personal suggestion would be to do both. Follow Scott Berkun - his blog, Twitter, he knows his stuff.

You also need to some sites and courses to guide you throughout your journey. This article (https://blog.codegiant.io/5-best-websites-for-learning-progr...) has some cool sites for learning programming.

All in all, the best way to excel is to find a mentor.