nand2tetris VS icebreaker-workshop

It sounds you are asking about CS fundamentals. I recommend https://www.nand2tetris.org/

A few resources which you may want to check out, in roughly increasing order of difficulty:

- Free Code Camp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/

- CS50: https://cs50.harvard.edu/x/2023/

- How to Design Programs (HTDP): https://htdp.org/

- Nand2Tetris: https://www.nand2tetris.org/

These are geared towards making you a better programmer in general, though it won't necessarily bring you closer to an AI/ML career.

Also, math is pretty important if you want to get into AI and similar things. Even otherwise math is important; don't listen to people who say you can get by without the math! So, try to get a head start on probability, calculus, linear algebra etc.

Good luck!

Gosh, I'm embarrassed about what I was up to when I was 16.

it may also help to see exactly how these numbers we've represented using circuitry are used by a computer. if you want a hands on approach, the projects in this book are the best intro to the inner workings of a computer i know of. this channel is also good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJc9CZcvBc

Diligent makes several boards for three educational market, prices in the sub-$200 range. (And the devices are small enough they can be used with the no-cost version of the AMD/Xilinx toolchain.)

https://digilent.com/shop/fpga-boards/development-boards/int...

For online courses, I've heard good things about Nand2Tetris but have not tried it myself.

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

I've also been through the nand2tetris course as well with the accompanying textbook, and it will make you learn how a computer works from the ground up. You will need to learn some programming language before completing the second half of the course, though.

I like the iCEBreaker board, relatively cheap (80 euro), uses the digilent Pmod interface for add-on boards and the Lattice FPGA works well with OSS tooling (Yosys, Icestorm, ...)

Here are some project tutorials for it (should be easy to adapt to other hardware too):

https://github.com/icebreaker-fpga/icebreaker-workshop

You can check if you can get a good start with the open-source toolchain with this tutorial: https://github.com/icebreaker-fpga/icebreaker-workshop (PDF: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/icebreaker-fpga/icebreaker-workshop/master/stopwatch/icebreaker-fpga-stopwatch-workshop.pdf )