To a programmer, the real nuts and bolts of category theory aren't a ton of use. People have had some success reverse engineering some of these concepts into pr

To a programmer, the real nuts and bolts of category theory aren't a ton of use. People have had some success reverse engineering some of these concepts into programming technologies, but it is a very long road to learn enough CT to either replicate or benefit from that road. There's also the regular misinterpretation that mathematical objects like, e.g. monoids, are well understood through CT. That's pretty false. There's the "intermediate level" of abstract algebra where you can study these objects and the world they live in much more directly and immediately. There's some real benefit from learning some parts of abstract algebra. Trying to learn CT in order to learn abstract algebra is complete overkill, though. In both of these cases, my advice boils down to "just learn the things you're interested in directly as opposed to 'via' CT". That's because CT is really what happens when you boil and boil and boil away these different fields and are just left with some very universal ideas. Abstract nonsense. If you're a mathematician and these concepts are your daily bread and butter... hey, you might still not want to learn CT because it's better to just work with what you're studying directly. Okay, objections and disclaimers over. The thing you can learn from CT which is interesting and valuable is the very powerful, universal perspective of "if you want to understand something, look at how it relates to other things". Category theory is absolutely focused on this idea and most of its insight is that this idea, taken in its extreme, is extraordinarily far reaching. Again, you can probably learn this more practically by studying where it shows up in something you actually care about. It won't be a theorem there, but instead just sort of "in the fabric" of the field, a major technique used in proofs. CT is nice because it unified those "folk theorems" from all over mathematics. More relevantly, in programming the CT perspective lies close to the FP perspective where "transformations" of data and "pipelines" are given center stage as opposed to "objects" and "procedures". It's also embedded in ideas of domain specific languages and both concrete and abstract interpretations, thereof. Most likely, you want to learn the actual techniques of interest and then maybe later just learn a bit of CT to get a sense for "how they all connect". I think there are opportunities for CT to influence your programming if you were to become familiar with it, but they're still kind of fuzzy today. Finally, if you want to learn CT I recommend you learn abstract algebra first via Aluffi's "Algebra: Chapter 0". It's secretly a CT book, but is not trying to be so abstract. You can also learn a lot from Schanuel and Lawvere's "Conceptual Mathematics" which, I feel, is one of the better books for establishing the "category theoretic POV".