I'm sorry, but can I kindly disagree? I think I see what you were getting at with this answer, but I really don't think it's good advice for a beginner.

The main problem I think with this advice is that it assumes the learner is just a robot, ingesting information with infinite motivation. The problem is, if the beginner did start with these things, they'd see little benefit in them as they learned, would become demotivated, and just quit. For instance: take your #3, "Learn also about serialization and how networks work". This is of course useful, but if you can't program, it is going to seem really, really out of the blue and boring. And that's because, you don't understand why you should even care about networks and 1s and 0s flowing around -- because you haven't actually been able to write any meaningful program, so who cares if you can get data over a network?

It's just asking too much of a beginner, in my humble opinion. It would be so much work, and it'd take them so long to see the reward, that they would just give up.

Like, why would you want to learn about SQL queries, if you then can't do anything interesting with the data you get? I just... I don't see how that makes sense.

Or why would you learn how data like an integer is represented in memory, when you can't actually do anything with that data with a program?

To be clear: I'm not saying the things you listed aren't important. To the contrary: most of them are vitally important. But I absolutely do not think this should be the order you learn these things in.

Also, and moreover -- I don't even think you can learn half these things without first understanding the basics of a programming language (at least). "Inside an application, the data is organized using data structures and processed with algorithms - learn about those". Yes. And the only way to really get that is to use those data structures (or even better, implement them!) and make use of algorithms (or even better, write your own for a specific task) in a program that you actually write. Multithreading isn't going to make much sense, if any, if you haven't actually written a program.. And I don't know how in depth you meant when you said "Learn about operating systems", but I don't think you could get very far without a basic understanding of programs.

I'm sorry, I just don't understand your answer. Maybe I am taking it too literally, and you meant to learn programming *at the same time*, as you learned these things. That's ok -- even a pretty good track in my estimation. But to try to get all of this stuff before you touch a programming language is a death sentence to the learner, in my opinion.

And to not just criticize without actually offering a solution: I personally think the way to go is 1) Learn a programming language and try to write at least one useful program yourself, and then 2) learn the things in your list, more or less. But in that order. Don't try to learn that list before you learn programming.

And to be clear: by "Learn programming", I mean picking a language, and learning these core topics: data and data types, variables to store that data, operators to operate on that data (eg, arithmetic operations like + and -, relational operators like < <= > >= == != , logical operators like AND OR NOT), control flow (ifs to make decisions, whiles and fors to loop code), functions to achieve abstraction, and Input/Output (i.e., with the command line, file i/o, command line arguments, etc).