He is a pretty respected and known (former)reviewer in the tech industry. Used to be a writer for anandtech for many years, and now does some kine of consulting for tech companies. But most importantly, he personally knows, and as far as i know is respected, by both ltt and gamersnexus.
Single main takeaway here, dont use msvc if you want your sorting algorithms to be fast. Quite surprised by how large the difference is.
Sure, the Odin project does seem like a good starter resource. Full disclosure hoewever is that I havent used it myself, I went through it due to you post. It also is difficult say as everyone has a different learning style for these things, i dont know what yours is. However strictly speaking to the eloquent javascript book you will find the ramp up of difficulty be way smoother (the book goes from modules to aynch programming wow). I did however notice that the odin project is very focussed on learning how to programming, without learning why the code does what it does. A bit like learning how to work with a machine without learning how the machine works (just do this to get this result, dont ask why it is that way). This is not necessarily bad, if it is what you are looking for. Also personally I find that even their advanced course have a low to mid skill ceiling, not what I would call “advanced for experts”. Anyway you could spend days trying to find the best foothold to start programming, or you could just start and learn along the way. Odin project seems like a good way to just start doing stuff. I would recommend going a bit further with the projects, personally I have found that programming is something you learn by doing, and considering you already are quite good with server management and such you already have the skills to search stuff to implement something extra. Good luck!
I still am not sure what to think of this entire thing. It feels that at a certain point someone started playing some circus music, and they forgot to turn it off.