Audible Genius (http://www.audiblegenius.com) -> This is really a good resource. The subscription will be online tomorrow, 14,99$/m. I'm using it for some months now and it's really helpful, it develop your ear enormously. It's from the same guy who created Syntorial (http://www.syntorial.com).

Dance Music Manual (http://www.dancemusicproduction.com) from Rick Snoman, version 4 has been recently released and it's the only book you need (for a time being). I don't own it but Secrets of Dance Music Production looks good too.

Melodics (http://www.melodics.com) is also good for practicing keyboard, if you're interested in learning to play the keyboard.

Music Production is very similar to front-end development, especially Javascript development. Your hardware-software studio is like your bundle system, continuous integration etc. So there are many moving parts to learn and it takes time and many many readings (books, blogs, forums, facebook groups, music store product descriptions etc.). It also takes time to develop your ear and in time you will see that new levels will be opened in your mind, like a game. You will hear more details, you will easily describe the qualities of the sound (is it sine wave or a square, what kind of sonic movements happening, what kind of effects with what kind of settings make that specific sound sound like that)

It's fun, takes time, may take money (if you're interested in hardware studio and premium software plugins). But it's basically so much fun!

If you know how to use the tools but can't make anything that feels like music, you just have to keep copying songs until you understand how it works. It's just practice like anything else. There's a bunch of fantastic youtube channels that show the whole production process now too.

If you don't know how to use the tools, that's a whole world. There's a bunch of different camps, but if you're trying to do EDM, then Ableton Live or FL Studio are pretty popular. There's open source stuff too, but I don't know much about it. Some people prefer to use hardware instead. Then there's those weird modular synth nerds. It really depends what you want to do and how much you want to spend. A commercial package like FL Studio will come with a bunch of standard plugins that would get you pretty far before venturing into the world of virtual instruments.

There's a few books on the subject (Dance Music Manual comes to mind), but honestly I don't think they're very helpful. You can get extremely far without knowing any music theory, and it's hard to describe audio stuff in a book, so you'll probably get more out of youtube searches about whatever you're trying to do.

Resources in the sibling comments are good.

Aside from those, get a demo version of Ableton and start playing around. Your efforts will suck. Accept it and enjoy the process :) Once you've reached a certain level of competence it's worth asking more experienced producers how to improve, ideally in person, quite possibly via paying for a lesson or two.

Also, listen to a lot of music. OP will be a great starting point!

Not sure about books, but there are sites like adsrsounds.com which have (paid) video tutorial courses for learning music production with DAWs, and I think videos are the best medium for learning this sort of software because of the combination of audio and visual. I'm sure there must be other similar sites, but this is the only one I have any experience of. YouTube would also probably be a useful resource, but you'd have to search through a load of cruft before finding something useful.

Just bear in mind that writing music with DAWs requires the same level of commitment (time, effort and financial) as learning a traditional instrument.

edit: just seen the sibling comment, so as I suspected there are plenty of resources available! :)

back in the day, from drum and bass/jungle, essentially it consisted of hanging out on dogasonacid.com the grid subforum. not srure about other genres. there are some online courses nowadays