Many moons ago I was in a steno school and can confirm that even a basic level of proficiency is a lot of work. It takes a lot of practice to get used to things like having the same letter on both sides of the keyboard (unmarked!), missing letters, umpteen rules for how to break up words and all the special patterns for common words and word endings. Often you have to press two keys with the same finger. I remember there was a concert pianist enrolled at the school that was on the fast track, but for normal people it's just plain difficult.

If you prefer more structured learning then online courses are probably best as they tend to be more current. However most of the good coders I know would just grab a reference and start writing code. There are countless programmers out there whose only experience is in a high level language, and don't properly understand how things work at a lower level. If you are good in C and C++, you can better understand what the higher level languages are doing under the covers. C++ is far more complex than these other languages.

If you can't figure out a good pet project, then start solving problems in books like "Programming Challenges" or "Elements of Programming Interviews" in your new language of choice. Porting software is also a good way to learn about a language. I learned Powershell by porting a bunch of Perl scripts.

I primarily bought this book for the very interesting treatment of data structures for storing large numbers of IP addresses and CIDR networks. Having already worked with the LCTrie http://www.nada.kth.se/~snilsson/public/papers.htm l to deal with very large numbers of networks, I found the discussion of Lulea vs. LCTrie and other formats quite useful. The fact that I don't do hardware level work didn't make those sections any less interesting.