Agreed; it's hard to figure out the right questions to ask.
What might be helpful is a place I could go to that has broad but thorough overviews of topics, where I could learn what I need to learn. Or what my options are.
I think these two commentators (TillE and hodder) have put into words what I have been grappling for many weeks now. And I give can you a specific example.
I've been trying to learn about GUIs and cloud computing. For GUIs, for weeks now I've been saying I know how to program, but I have no idea how I can make something visual. I used Processing, and that was excellent, but then it turned out that it wasn't what I needed (there was no 'delete', so if I rendered a circle, I couldn't delete it). I also looked into Quartz Composer and I thought it was called ngraphics, but Google isn't showing anything called that. It was a Graphics Library for C++. I even installed a VM and Linux (I had to learn how to install a VM and Linux) to try some open-source software instead of trying to learn about GUIs, but that didn't suit my needs either.
So that's GUIs. The other one is cloud computing. I want, say a website and an app, and I want them to submit a form, then the server would do some calculations with these forms and then send back the calculations. I have nothing to say about this. I have no idea where to start. I don't know what this is called. I don't know what to Google.
But having these two people put into words what I have been grappling with is a huge relief. I think I will take a step back and re-evaluate my situation.
Definitely. Meta-learning is something that's tough. Recently I enrolled into CodeSchool.com and there are lots of interesting sounding tutorials. I code in Python and want to be more proficient in web development, the problem I face is, okay, where should I start?
Another example is, if I learned programming in python, what do I do to get to the next level?
What might be helpful is a place I could go to that has broad but thorough overviews of topics, where I could learn what I need to learn. Or what my options are.