First, don't call people "monkeys". Second, just enjoy programming and tinkering for its own sake. There is no rush to gain membership into some kind of mythical elite crowd. In fact, that label itself, "elite", is derogatory, and ascribing it to your would-be mentors might just turn them off.
C is not hard. You will probably have harder time understanding the vocabulary, than the concepts themselves. Read Beej's C and network programming guides. Get a Free UNIX, download the source for simple utilities and tinker.
Don't confuse C programming with Unix systems/network programming. You can write C to write anything, but it excels at low-level stuff. Also, don't scoff at higher-level languages; you can cover a lot more ground and learn more using higher abstraction. Go and Rust should be preferred to C at this stage. Clojure and Scala are yet higher level and support more paradigms. Hadoop and Spark and domain-specific tools, not really programming languages. Node is probably good for something, but I have no experience with it.
Comments
First, don't call people "monkeys". Second, just enjoy programming and tinkering for its own sake. There is no rush to gain membership into some kind of mythical elite crowd. In fact, that label itself, "elite", is derogatory, and ascribing it to your would-be mentors might just turn them off.
C is not hard. You will probably have harder time understanding the vocabulary, than the concepts themselves. Read Beej's C and network programming guides. Get a Free UNIX, download the source for simple utilities and tinker.
http://beej.us/guide/bgc/
http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/
Don't confuse C programming with Unix systems/network programming. You can write C to write anything, but it excels at low-level stuff. Also, don't scoff at higher-level languages; you can cover a lot more ground and learn more using higher abstraction. Go and Rust should be preferred to C at this stage. Clojure and Scala are yet higher level and support more paradigms. Hadoop and Spark and domain-specific tools, not really programming languages. Node is probably good for something, but I have no experience with it.