Honestly instead of taking paid courses that promise to teach incredibly difficult subjects in weeks, just take one of the longer courses like Andrew Ng's that start with the fundamentals and are free. Bootcamp style education is awful.
On the other hand, I respect people who are willing to spend the time and effort to truly learn something from scratch. Start with a basic math and ML course, then go on more difficult ones, read papers, implement papers and projects, and so on. The same goes for other topics such as distributed systems, compilers and programming languages, etc. There are no "learn X in Y weeks" shortcuts. I understand that not everyone may be able to do this and many will give up along the way, and I don't think that's a bad thing. It's a great filter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsus_in_uno,_falsus_in_omnib...
Really interesting reading that Norvig's piece. I agree with almost all of it and think what we're doing at Delta Academy lines up with most of it!
Particularly:
> The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again.
This is exactly what we do - providing weekly challenges that stretch your ability (that also happen to be fun), discussing the approaches taken by teams & giving expert feedback on code.
And his recipe for programming success:
> Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in your ten years/10,000 hours.
> Program. The best kind of learning is learning by doing.
> Talk with other programmers; read other programs. This is more important than any book or training course.
> Work on projects with other programmers.
Again - team projects which are fun sound right up his street.