tutorials never worked for me, far too boring

was much easier to just find existing codebases and tinker with some functionality of them to learn, while asking those more experienced to clarify anything i couldn't figure out with a bit of trial and error/looking up usage of similar code elsewhere within the codebase

personally, i learned c++/lua (though im not by any means 'advanced' in them) from an mmo server emulator since it was easy to see how gameplay was affected and compare expected vs intended results

also im barely awake rn so this comment probably makes zero sense