Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

I also think it's worth saying, "you don't need to be an expert in programming to try it! Start by tinkering!" (Other comments have been downvoted for describing what tinkering might look like, but any tinkering is valid! Try running llama.cc on your MacBook! Quantize a model yourself)

Ultimately, you'll become good if you do it a lot, and you'll do it a lot if you have one or more hobby projects that you're motivated to work on. I have a few friends who are completely self taught (one going the Arduino / electronics / hardware route, the other going the web app and tools for personal use route), and the keys to their success is that they have projects they like working on. And they've kept at it for years.

They don't know everything, and they don't necessarily have great foundations, but it's not too hard to learn things on an as-needed basis these days. Both of them find information very differently than I do, which is also valuable for me to learn and see.

There are other ways to motivate yourself: taking a class with homework that gets you coding (the success of this strategy depends on the person!), finding an accountability buddy who you discuss your projects with, finding an open source project you're interested in (start by adding comments, fixing typos, or looking for a good "first timer" GitHub issue), do Recurse Center (although their job placement program may have limited options for junior / entry level engineers)

At some point, you'll have beaten your head against a problem (how can I order these things correctly? How do I get this interaction to work correctly? Why is my component re rendering in an infinite loop?) and you'll watch a video or read a blog post explaining it and you will truly understand the issue. It will be common, and you might have encountered it in a 201 class, but your first-hand experience will help it stick.

Another totally valid way to learn programming is to be good enough to get a job [1] and then be paid to figure it out day after day, and ideally have experienced programmers mentoring you. I've seen people go through bootcamps get a lot out of it, but I think the quality is highly variable

[1] unfortunately, while I think this was a really good path ten years ago, the bar continues to be raised (new grads with internship experience can be very good, companies are not hiring as aggressively today as they did in the world of zero percent interest rates)

My tech lead did this.

It feels like we’re still in the alchemist days. Eventually the chemists will come along. They’ll systemize our ad-hoc observations and jettison a ton of them. Until then… Neuton was an alchemist and he still made some pretty big contributions.