I'm a first principles thinker and prefer to learn from books, but it must be said that games are really exciting and YouTube videos very engaging. Books... not

I'm a first principles thinker and prefer to learn from books, but it must be said that games are really exciting and YouTube videos very engaging. Books... not so much. Indeed, as a teenager in the 90's I first learnt to code from videos ("Learn Visual Basic Now" from Microsoft). First principles aren't much fun when the path to applying them in the manner you want is measured in years - this is where having an engaging and relatable teacher makes all the difference (out of scope here). I've found that it's much easier to jump into coding in an established environment where there's a large ecosystem that's well-groomed by a large corporate entity, so think Unity/C# or Swift Playgrounds. There's less jargon, fewer ways to do the same thing, and much, much better and varied learning resources. My younger brother got into coding as a teenager, via an interest in gaming, nudged along by me. There were several false starts as the kind of games he was interested in, namely 3D MMORPGs built by thousands of engineers and artists, had no beginner-level on-ramp to learning. Eventually he picked up enough coding skills that he developed an interest in coding in general and went on to study it in college. 20 years later I still don't think he's written a game though :) but he does write code that schedules the UKs trains!