Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

back in the day, from drum and bass/jungle, essentially it consisted of hanging out on dogasonacid.com the grid subforum. not srure about other genres. there are some online courses nowadays

If you know how to use the tools but can't make anything that feels like music, you just have to keep copying songs until you understand how it works. It's just practice like anything else. There's a bunch of fantastic youtube channels that show the whole production process now too.

If you don't know how to use the tools, that's a whole world. There's a bunch of different camps, but if you're trying to do EDM, then Ableton Live or FL Studio are pretty popular. There's open source stuff too, but I don't know much about it. Some people prefer to use hardware instead. Then there's those weird modular synth nerds. It really depends what you want to do and how much you want to spend. A commercial package like FL Studio will come with a bunch of standard plugins that would get you pretty far before venturing into the world of virtual instruments.

There's a few books on the subject (Dance Music Manual comes to mind), but honestly I don't think they're very helpful. You can get extremely far without knowing any music theory, and it's hard to describe audio stuff in a book, so you'll probably get more out of youtube searches about whatever you're trying to do.

Not sure about books, but there are sites like adsrsounds.com which have (paid) video tutorial courses for learning music production with DAWs, and I think videos are the best medium for learning this sort of software because of the combination of audio and visual. I'm sure there must be other similar sites, but this is the only one I have any experience of. YouTube would also probably be a useful resource, but you'd have to search through a load of cruft before finding something useful.

Just bear in mind that writing music with DAWs requires the same level of commitment (time, effort and financial) as learning a traditional instrument.

edit: just seen the sibling comment, so as I suspected there are plenty of resources available! :)

Here is a screenshot of the classic Flash version: https://www.electronicbeats.net/the-feed/ishkurs-guide-elect...

Ishkur's guide may have been useful in 1998. It's now super outdated.