It is worth your while to learn OOP if you haven't and at least some of the technical stuff. I am a lot like you, engineering background as well. However, if

It is worth your while to learn OOP if you haven't and at least some of the technical stuff. I am a lot like you, engineering background as well. However, if you try to just freestyle even a medium sized project without any knowledge it will become unmanageable in only a few months. Most things you can just learn to do by doing plus some google, but there are better ways to do a lot of these things and you should at least try and do something like program chess in C++/C#/java/obj-c with OOP and inheritance. It will significantly speed up your ability to do subsequent projects and increase the scope of projects that you are capable of doing.