This is a very good question. My best answer is: find a mentor. Someone you can repeatedly ask for detailed pointers from as you get stuck. This could be a co

This is a very good question. My best answer is: find a mentor. Someone you can repeatedly ask for detailed pointers from as you get stuck. This could be a colleague, an IRC/Discord friend or even someone on Twitter that you have bonded with. I have been mentoring people close to me on computers and Linux since I was about 13 years old and am now 39. And it has been a real blessing, since you learn a lot by being forced to explain what you already know. As a teenager I didn’t think of this as mentoring of course. But I wad very lucky to have had my 3 years older brother as computing mentor, which gave me a great head start compared to my peers. Not knowing exactly where you or others reading this comment are currently getting stuck, here are a few random pointers: netstat -a -n -l -p ls -la /proc man mdadm iptables -L -n rsync -a -e ssh myfolder user@host: And reading Beij’s (?) tutorial on TCP socket programming if you are an aspiring C programmer.