> Also, serious off-topic question to the motorcycle enthusiasts here: how do you cope with the fact that your weekend leisure ride is often a massive noise disturbance for hundreds of people and animals?
AFAICT, the noise is the point. The people with loud vehicles (and this includes the rattling bass and coffee can mufflers on low-end econoboxes) are selfish assholes, desperate for attention, often compensating for a failure in another part of their lives. "Loud pipes save lives" has zero data to back it up.
This is awesome! While I'm nowhere near being able to leverage this right now, I am currently going through the painful process of "databasing" raw documents into SQL, and I can tell you that perhaps the hardest part is getting the schema correct; as you put it "natural language can often be ambiguous". Even worse, is just the squishiness of things never originally intended to be specified for software.
Communication always has been, and continues to be, the hardest part of software development.
I just went through the Emacs tutorial (C-h t), then used Emacs everyday, for everything. I pick up bits and pieces here and there across the web. I went through Chassel's Emacs lisp book a while back, but can't remember most of it as I felt it's more aimed at developing Emacs itself.
A lot of Emacs is self-documenting and I use that. Look at the docs for the current mode (C-h m), learn keybindings (C-h b), change settings (M-x customize-group), read the info pages (C-h i m emacs).
Funnily enough, studying Common Lisp has helped me more easily read elisp.
> I spent some time a decade ago learning better emacs skills (macros on the fly).
This. I spent a week in 2000 focusing on learning Emacs. To this day, I'll use downtime to browse through packages, forums and documentation looking for new (to me) things to tweak Emacs with, or new (mostly CLI) tools. I just discovered the various rainbow modes last month, and life is so much better.
> Examples: live online trainings, katacoda, notebooks, sandboxes and certifications.
To some of us, we don't learn very well from those things. Books tend to have a higher knowledge value and other advantages. For a discount, I'd be willing to give those things up, assuming I wasn't already getting access to Safari through work and didn't already have a reading list of purchased books a mile long.
Books, but then I've always learned best from books - you set your own pace, they are easily cross-referenced and indexable, and to top it all off books are more often than not structured and well-organized. Re-reading is also an option. I point out all these things to contrast books to lectures or coaching, or even videos; they're just not the same or as good as a good book.
As for specifics, if you haven't read it already, "The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master" is excellent and a great place to start, and one of their biggest tips? Read books, at least one per quarter.
AFAICT, the noise is the point. The people with loud vehicles (and this includes the rattling bass and coffee can mufflers on low-end econoboxes) are selfish assholes, desperate for attention, often compensating for a failure in another part of their lives. "Loud pipes save lives" has zero data to back it up.