I came here to recommend Warcraft 3 also. It's how my son started on the path to coding. Being able to add to an existing platform gave his early efforts some polish that encouraged him to continue.
Another atlast fan here. I used it as an extension language for SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) and wrote games for the GP2X handheld in a Forth-like language. Everything should be scriptable.
We tried it with just PostgreSQL and struggled with missed jobs. We tried it with Redis + PostgreSQL and haven't looked back. I'll take the blame for not engineering the first version adequately (this was before upsert) but Redis has been useful in so other ways that I'm glad it ended up in our architecture.
Take a look at "A Book of Abstract Algebra" by Charles Pinter. It's published by Dover, so very affordable. I've seen it criticized as too verbose, but that worked for me.
Check out "Linear Algebra and Learning from Data" by Gilbert Strang. It includes a nice introduction to Linear Algebra, touches on relevant statistics and optimization, then puts them all together in chapters on neural networks. It's a textbook, so exercises are included.
My wife and I lived in Florida but drove home to Virginia every year for Christmas. Work schedules being what they were, we had to be back in Florida on January 1st or 2nd. We rang in quite a few New Years toasting Waffle House coffee somewhere along I95.
Edit: She just reminded me, no one else in the restaurant ever seemed to care.
AS someone that recently transitioned from engineer to engineering manager, I don't feel like I'm doing less. Quite the opposite. Is the work as worthwhile? It is mandated by the company. So no real engineering would happen without it. Is the work as rewarding? Not yet and that makes it feel more like "work" than my previous job. I hope that changes as time goes on.
BFA in illustration. Started off designing web sites, then moved to programming to make them dynamic. It seemed like a natural step. Now I work with some pretty large data sets and have gone back to school part time to study math and machine learning so I can get more out of them.
They seem to agree. From the article, "...after you've read something once, you've gotten what you're going to get out of it, and then you need to go out and start applying the information."
I think that's an important point. Even if you don't quit this time, you have to keep trying.
I tried to quit at least six or seven times before finally succeeding eight years ago. The last time, I used nicotine gum for about a week. Before that, I had quit for up to a month, more than once, with help from either the patch or gum. All my relapses came during social situations.