> Strangely, dealing with computers at this extremely basic level of stored instruction pointers, buffer overflows and assembly language actually let me gain the skills required to be an "actual programmer".

There is nothing strange about that. People learn in different ways. For me the Head First books were a great alternative to the scores of dry "here is fact 1. And here is proof for fact 1. Here is fact 2. Here is proof for fact 2." books, which bored me to death and didn't help me with learning.