I'll go one step further: for many slightly-obscure technical topics, the intermediate writing between beginner and advanced is rare or simply doesn't exist. I struggled with this when I was trying to learn functional programming--writing on the subject is mostly linked-lists/lambda/map/reduce/filter, or όλα είναι ελληνικά για μένα. This goes even for better writers who do have an audience in mind: their audience is either complete beginners, or people with advanced academic degrees in the field. It took me years to find writings that bridge that gap.

This X 1000. I tried learning programming several times in my younger life, maybe 3 or 4 efforts at getting some 'basics'. Never thought I would be able to program until I picked up Unity on a whim and started learning C#. Lo and behold, documentation is now plentiful and tutorials are a vast landscape.

Nearly every 'beginner' lesson or tutorial or book on programming that I have seen state in the beginning that 'some programming experience recommended.'

What material did you find? I too have noticed this gap and been searching.

I found a lot of the stuff on Matt Might's blog helpful. He writes a bit about compiling Scheme to C, which allows me to see what each piece of Scheme is doing in a language I know.[1] Following this approach, I found LISP In Small Pieces[2], Compiling With Continuations[3], etc. There's more but I have to dig it up.

[1] http://matt.might.net/articles/programming-with-continuation...

[2] https://pages.lip6.fr/Christian.Queinnec/WWW/LiSP.html

[3] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/compiling-with-continua...