I'm blown away by how good introductory programming resources are nowadays. I tried out the JS / TS / regex / sql stuff on executeprogram.com and it's just way better than anything that existed 20 years ago. Likewise for PHP stuff at https://laracasts.com/. I don't love that it's video but, even so, it's much more beginner friendly than a ruby or perl book from 20 years ago.

See also, Julia Evans's work for systems, as well as https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ for a not quite beginner text, etc.