Where is a person to start in CS as an older prospect?
I know there will be generic answers along the lines of "Figure it out" or "Use logic", but I wanted to see if we could dive deeper to hopefully cultivate a more fruitful answer to help others get a better start at their career in computer science.
for context, I am a 34 year old male (prior military) who decide to make a career change from medical to technology. Ive always been an avid gamer, but wouldn't call myself "Tech savvy". My last encounter with computers on an academic level was during high school where we learned excel and learned about floppy disc, etc. I did not get any exposure to lower level programming or any higher level programming until my first intro to computer science class where I was absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of ancillary information I was not privy to prior to the class. Although I passed the class, I never felt like the class was a true "Introduction to computer science". To their credit, we did learn for/ while loops, decisions, functions, I/o, exceptions, etc. but actually learning binary number systems/ the history of computer science, how we got from the first computer (ENIAC) was never included in the curriculum.
To tie this all together, I was trying to get a good grasp of how you would instruct any prospective students looking to enter into computer science on where to start. The gap from knowing absolutely nothing to being "job ready" seems like a planetary feat and I feel like telling someone to "figure it out" seems a little dismissive and reductive in helping out the junior developers who want to break into the field.
So my question is, where is a student to start in his CS journey? what are the absolute first few things they should be learning? How should they train their minds to think logically/ abstractly? who should they be following? Where are spaces for new people to congregate and learn these tools? Should we learn to code without the use of AI? Should we embrace it? and many other questions that new people should know would be very much helpful.