I'm an engineering Ph.D. student who needs to deal with lots of programming in my career path. However, as I said in the title, I run into problems almost every time I want to install a new programming language, an IDE, or even a new package.
Of course, I start to troubleshoot by blindly copying and pasting the error messages into google in the hope of finding someone who would have been dealing with the exact same problem before. But sometimes I get lost. I have once ruined everything so badly that I had to re-install the whole OS! There are also times that my problem is resolved, but still, I have no sense about what exactly was the problem.
Long story short, I want to change this and start learning about something from scratch that may help me with that. But I don't know where to start! Any suggestions in this regard? I am familiar with programming with Python, Julia, and using some LaTeX through overleaf. That's all!
I believe this is the problem of so many other engineering students who want to start programming but are stuck at step zero :-)
(To be more specific, I can name a few keywords that pop up more frequently than others during the troubleshooting process: PATH environment, zsh, compile error, kernel, package not found, terminal, shell, etc.)
Edit: of course I did lots of research about these terms on the internet. Posting here was my last option. My question is very specific. I did not ask for explaining these terms to me. I wanted to know what area or field (or even fields) covers such concepts. Is it Linux? Should I learn C or C++? Or is there any other course/programming language/whatever I can go and start learning , knowing what I have said will be covered?