Eh. Hard to say as I've learned most of my programming stuff in university, and I hate video tutorials for almost everything (I prefer reading at my own pace). However, I do have a few tips that you might (or might not) find useful:

• Try to find something interesting to practice with. It can be quite boring to do simple exercises with no real point to them, especially if you're learning at your own pace and have no external incentive to go on. This is probably pretty subjective, but my experiences were like this.
• After learning the basics of programming, if you want to get into game development as quickly as possible, pick an existing, easy game engine to work with instead of starting from scratch and creating your own engine. For example, Unity is pretty easy to learn. Unreal Engine might sound more interesting due to everything you can do with it, but I'd pick the easy choice just to get something done first.
• And finally, the language doesn't matter. All of the most commonly used languages are pretty similar to each other, so if you learn one, learning another is very easy. Pick a C-like language (preferably a somewhat modern one, e.g. C#, Java, Python, and not C or C++ unless you want a bit of an extra challenge). If you want to aim for Unity at first, C# might be a convenient choice as Unity uses it. But ultimately which one you choose doesn't matter very much. For all I know, the best choice is the one that has the best tutorials available at this point.

Anyway, I google'd some tutorials, and at least the tutorialspoint C# Tutorial seemed pretty good. They also seem to have other tutorials in case you're interested, but I didn't check them out too well. You might also want to check out if there's any good MOOCs you could take. I also checked out some other search results, but none of those caught my eye as being that great for a beginner.

Thanks heaps, this helps alot :)

You also mentioned you are a game designer. There are courses for that here as game designer but I'm not too sure what that entail exactly. It seems it has more to do with identifying and applying principles and presenting ideas etc but it seems a whole 2 year course it a bit much for that??

Wow that really does look like a true progression of visuals. When you say "next" consoles, you mean the Neo/Scorpio? Or the PS5/Xbox II hehe.

I'm making my way through thread slowly, coming back to it now and again, I watched the ND tech talk and they quickly went over shaders. They said that they the old method was to paint the detail directly onto the mesh but shaders are different. What is shaders, what the difference to painting it on and what are the advantages of shaders?

What I get from the ND vid is that you get shader packages and choose what detail you would like to apply to a surface and with shaders you can apply any degree of intensity of that shader effect. Shader intensity can be changed real time so you could, for example, apply a wet shader effect to clothes if they walk through water in real time. Shaders can also be stacked on top of each other. Is all that correct?

There you are