No.1691
I don't think you need to know how to program to be considered digitally literate. You certainly don't need to learn four different programming languages and read a book that is basically career advice for software engineers.
If I were in your place, I would study these topics in some detail, in some cases even Wikipedia would be more than enough:
- computer architecture: cpu, memory, disks, peripheries, data representation, etc., differences between desktop computers, laptops, servers, mobile, embedded
- "systems" software: operating systems (processes, scheduling, files, drivers, libraries, windowing systems, etc.), compilers, interpreters, shells, etc.
- networking: packet switching, OSI model, IPv4 and IPv6, TCP/UDP, some example protocols (e.g., ICMP, ARP, DNS), look up what an RFC is and skim some that seems interesting; figure out how you can look at your network traffic and read about the protocols that look interesting
- WWW: take a look at HTTP, maybe even read the RFC, look at HTTP requests using Firefox's inspector, look up the things you don't understand; learn some basic HTML and CSS, like you were planning to pimp your myspace profile
- encryption: look into HTTPS, certificates; public key cryptography, PGP, GPG, start using it right now; E2EE for XMPP/Matrix, etc. Skip the mathematics unless you are interested in it
- programming: just pick a language that looks nice, it doesn't matter which as long as you stick with it for a while
I am sure in a hour I will have a dozen new suggestions, but in the end you will have to decide for yourself what you spend time studying and what you care about.
And of course, read >>>/edu/338. You are not retarded or a pleb for not studying computers before.