You can vote for your two most useful resources

Also any specific recommendations would be great! I highly recommend a book called "The Artist's Way." It's not about anything technical; it's not even specific to music. But for exploring creativity and artistry i've never read anything more interesting

Messing around was a big one, but Google actually tought me the most of the "how theory works" stuff. You can find all of it out there if you search long enough.

I sold all of my electric guitars in order to fund my desire to begin producing. Bought a Maschine Mk2 drum pad from guitar center and tried my best to learn it inside and out by making as many beats as I could over the year.

Pretty much banged out shitty instrumentals until I could apply my knowledge of music theory and song-writing to my production.

Learned my sound design by watching tutorials from some of the bigger names in dubstep like J-Phelpz and the Wizards.

When I was just starting to produce, I would just get my hands dirty in Ableton and mess around, while watching YouTube tutorials all day. This was about 4 years ago...and that went great, but the only problem - for me personally - was that I got too comfortable with this method of learning alone, and with how much I had learned. I just kinda coasted down that path for a good long while, but realized I could've been working harder and making more progress, so earlier last year I basically decided to start teaching myself all over again and this time I decided to read (mainly because I have 2 jobs with a lot of downtime and limited wifi at both haha). It definitely helped to build on knowledge, and get some creative juices flowing. I also started watching YouTube tutorials again over a wider range of topics (not just massive patches l0l) and even took some notes haha. I think it helps to mix things up.

Here's what I read:

An alright selectionn...
Ableton's music strategy book was perfect.
..."Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" was kind of hard to swallow, but it was $0.04 on Amazon and gave me something to do at work, so I figured what the hell and gave it a read haha. I actually learned a lot about the history of the genres that I didn't know though. I liked that. Definitely made me appreciate the art a little more too.

I also read Daniel J. Levitin's "This Is Your Brain On Music" and highly recommend it!

Just by trying stuff and watching tutorials. I started with Reason, where i didn't know anything (couldn't even get a midi clip). Then i switched to ableton and that's what i still use today. But i feel that i've come to a point where trying is not enough anymore, since there are more complex things that get in the way that i didn't know about when i first opened a DAW.

Learned how to use Ableton at a small producing school (not even a school), figured I could teach myself, left the place, learned FL, watched tutorials

I taught myself basic music theory and I learned how to do things like sidechain and design sounds from YouTube tutorials. It ended up abandoning YT tutorials and figured out the rest myself.

I transposed all my favorite songs on guitar pro which is some basic midi program that allows you to input notes in the form of a guitar neck and it'll play it back for you. Eventually I started to compose my own songs and the rest is history.