It's really hard to recommend something without knowing what you're interested in. And you only know what you're interested in once you start exploring.
IT is really vast, and some positions do not require a lot of proper programming (besides some system scripts). My advice is to explore a lot of things, and narrow it down later down the line.
With that in mind, if you never programmed before, I would recommend starting with python. It's easy to learn, there are a ton of resources out there, and it's almost the "lingua franca" in a lot of areas (since it's so popular). I'd say most developers these days are at least familiar with python, so that gives you a lot of options of people you can work with.
The fact that it's so popular also means that whatever sub-problem you're trying to solve, most likely there's already a python library that does it, or some library written in another language that also includes python bindings.
Can't recommend a specific book (since I've learn it a long time ago), I'd start by searching "best python resources site:reddit.com", and go from there.
EDIT: apparently python can now be used inside Microsoft Excel. This might unlock some entry level positions to automate the admin workflow of a lot of companies (a lot of them heavily rely on Excel).
You're not going to learn much from a phone app. Specially programming.
"Learning apps" are mostly gamified gimmicks. If you never learned programming, you need a good book explaining the concepts of what you're trying to learn, a computer, a project, and the internet to search when you get stuck.
I know it's the boring answer, but this is one of those skills that it's basically a lot of tinkering, exploration, and nose to the grindstone.
It's 99% tech, but every once in a while you get an interesting post from a blog about something else. I then subscribe directly to the blogs I want to keep reading.
I've just been slowly curating my RSS feed for years. I like the high signal-to-noise ratio it provides me.
It's a metasearch engine (aggregates results from several engines and feeds then back to me).
It also filters out sites I don't want, and redirects Reddit to the old interface.
I love blogs, specially from people with niche interests and experiences. I follow them via RSS. So that's what I read outside of Lemmy / Reddit / Mastodon.
Recently I've been following the blog written by an IT guy working in a research station in Antarctica (also has a great domain name).
You can get both qwant, duckduckgo, and Google with SearXNG, unless the instance you used had a config to not have them as an option...
That's why I just prefer to use my own.