Serious title: I’m scared of math but I want nothing more than to teach my dropout ass to code so I can stop stocking Shelves and become marketable/desirable to a country that isn’t literally a decade or so away from gassing me.
If it helps, i vibed with python real hard in a 101 course, but all that hexadecimal shit kicked my ass when I signed up for a 103 being cocky and all.
Hexadecimal is a dumb format but it's usually confusing because you don't have an actual use case. And it's not actually used for anything. If you're learning programming, you don't need any serious math unless it's for a field that requires math. If math isn't your thing, don't become a game engine developer or do computer graphics, don't go into scientific computing (coincidentally Python is used a lot for that since it's easier than other languages for non-developers to use).
I just spent a long time learning how to use one language (Java, which is currently mainly used in enterprise servers and company-internal GUIs). That allows you to get in deep enough to give you a starting point to learn both the closer-to-hardware things (bits n' bytes, virtual memory and other CPU features, memory addressing, etc.) and more-abstract things (algorithms, designing larger software systems) and stuff like Internet Protocol and so on. There's a lot more to computers than textual programming languages, but programming is how you get practice using computers so you have a reason to understand how they work.
I can't really speak to your situation, but I'd guess to actually fill out your knowledge of computers you'll need some kind of course that will tell you which things you need to learn. The following is pure speculation, and is probably unhelpful, I am not a teacher (!!!). You could look at a university's degree requirements for CS, and look at the listed courses' syllabi and basically Google those topics. https://www.cs.washington.edu/academics/ugrad/current-students/degree. For example, I looked up CS 351 from that page, here's the syllabus https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse351/22sp/syllabus/#syllabus
It lists:
And on the course webpage for it, you can just look at the presentations:
https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse351/22sp/
https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse351/22sp/lectures/02/CSE351-L02-memory-I_22sp.pdf
Now instead of just reading this, you can find terms in it and Google them and find YouTube videos about them. But this is probably a painful way to learn lol, not sure if anyone actually does this. Just learn a programming language and try to make things in it.
That’s actually really good advice. I checked out some professors websites from my local school and some even have links to old lectures next to the syllabus.
SMH professors just putting out free learning for anyone who does a name search.