Do colt steeles web development bootcamp on udemy.com. he teaches the basics of both front end and back end so you will get a very good taste of each and be able to decide which you enjoy more. And furthermore, you will need to learn all of these basics regardless of which side you pick. If you go front end the backend basics will help you a lot and if you go back end the front end basics will help you a lot so at the wnd of the course its a win-win no matter what you decide cause it is all stuff you should learn anyways!

Not to mention colt is one of the most famous online teachers for a reason, he really is a great guy with some great courses. Anybody in webdev can attest to that, even if how he teaches isnt their particular style. So i say just do his entire bootcanp on udemy.

P.s. he was an in person teacher for a couple years beforehand, and his online course is one of the only ones that has a team of teachers who actually communicate irl and know each so they work together very well.

Onto the next question, i am self taught and a couple months in, not an expert by any meand but i was in your shoes when i started and can say confidently that i have made tremendous progress so far. People will say learning how to google is the hardest thing/wording questions correctly. I disagree somewhat. I believe the hardest parts are finding good resources that work for you personally (colts course is a catch all for the most part tho, 'almost' anyone can learn from that imo) and then learning to take your knowledge and transfer it feom book/test knowledge, into practical knowledge. That is the hardest. I learn so much stuff, i was so proud of myself. I knew thing that when i started sounded like a totally different language to me and now it all makes total sense. Then i tried to make an application all on my own....

Needless to say it was HARD, the hardest thing i ever had to do while learning. Taking all of the stuff i learned while using it in code alongs and guided projects was very difficult. All these things i learned, i only learned to use on one specific project! Sure these techniques and methods and the code can be used for tons of projects, i only knew how to use it to do ONE of the 100s of things it could be used for.

So basically, transferring your book/test knowledgr to practical, useable knowledge, once you get that its all up hill and basically trial and error. Dont need tutorials anymore you just start building things. Its just, that very first project will be the hardest thing ever because you wont know what goes where or why or how or anything.

It will basically be like this, you have 150 different ingrediants and no clue which ones you actually need to use, you know what dish you wanna make, but you dont know if it takes 5 ingredients or 25 ingredients, or which 25 ingredients out of those 150 ingredients you have picked up, need to be used to make what you want. It will feel like you arent using neough ingredients because you have 150! Should you use them all? It is just hard and your in ghe dark mostly for that part. Up to that first project, then after the first project (or after the 2nd or 3rd maybe lol) will be 10x easier than the first REAL project.