[gexla]

As an alternative, you could also look into PowerShell. it's open source and cross platform. I use it because it's really powerful on Windows.

In any programming language, you learn by practice. Given that your shell does so much, that's the easiest place to find tasks to practice on. I have been leaning on my shell scripts to do a lot of automation. The list is long and I just pick something from that list to work on for most days.

If you don't have system automation that you want to work on, then you probably have a lot of personal data that you can work with. I have scripts setup to manipulate data exports from the various services I consume and then remix that data in my own database. My shell scripts can get the data, operate on it and then shove it into a DB. Then I'll use something else to display that data.