Thanks for the advice.
When should I dive into frameworks? What concepts should I be familiar with apart from the basic building blocks (var, loops, control flows, etc)?
When should I dive into frameworks? What concepts should I be familiar with apart from the basic building blocks (var, loops, control flows, etc)?
Don't be too academic with these that it becomes boring, but just enough that you start feeling comfortable building some small console apps, that can read and write files, crawl some pages from the web, that kind of thing.
Once you're good with that, you can start with frameworks. The danger you want to avoid is to start too soon, and have a hard time separating the complexities of the language with the ones from the framework.
Very few people stay motivated to study, unless they have some kind of goal.
So try finding your goal first. Perhaps it would be to create something that would help your life as a journalist.
Then, once you have your goal, try to create it. You'll discover what you're missing. It might be that you don't know how to store things so that they can be found flexibly -- so you then study databases. It might be that your code is far too slow -- so you study algorithms. It might be that you need to plug in functionality that others have written -- so you study frameworks.
Good luck.