My advice is to find a good book that teaches the fundamentals. I'm currently reading "Power Programming with Mathematica: The Kernel" by David B. Wagner. It wa

My advice is to find a good book that teaches the fundamentals. I'm currently reading "Power Programming with Mathematica: The Kernel" by David B. Wagner. It was published in 1996 and covers then-new version 3, but boy is it good (and still very relevant!). A scanned PDF was made available for free with the permission of the publisher: https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/16485/are-you-interested-in-purchasing-david-wagners-power-programming-with-mathemat https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/16485/are-yo...