[ACGAuthor]

This probably isn't the place to bring this up, but since I don't really have any social life in coding circles (but I do in book circles) I thought I'd give it a shot.

I've never really learned how to program. I've been able to monkey-see/monkey-do some coding of game mods and so forth, by looking at mods other people had made, intuiting what the code was doing, and tweaking it to suit my own purposes.

But I've never built anything from the ground up, and there were always people around me working on similar projects just for the love of it who were happy to sort of mentor me until I understood what I was doing on my hobby horse project.

Now, however, I have a hobby horse that I don't have the skills for and don't really know how to go about acquiring those skills.

Long story short, I feel like there's a void where audiobook library management should be. Books (I'm on Mac) isn't going to do a satisfactory job of it. Calibre has an audiobook plugin, but from what I can tell, it looks like the emphasis there is on incorporating a player into Calibre, rather than on computer-side library management that transfers to and syncs progress with devices.

OpenAudible looks awesome in theory, but for some reason has no support for M4B audiobooks. It's focused on importing AAX or MP3 audiobooks only, and will only decrypt/export the AAX files as MP3. Since all my books are M4B, I haven't gotten far in exploring it.

Other pieces of audio library management software that I've tried seem mainly meant for music and just really don't have the features needed for BOOKS. Frankly if they handle books at all, it's mostly a lucky accident. Forget series management support or anything like that. The closest I've come to effective series management is to load my audiobook files into a podcast app and arrange them as episodes within a podcast.

I'm probably just being picky, but I feel like the only way I'm going to find a program to manage my files the way I want to is to do it myself. I just...have no idea where to begin. I have a whole outline of what I feel like an audio library management piece of software should do on one's computer and then how it should handle the files when syncing and transferring to a device-side app.

Since I'm a Mac user, and since Swift seems like a much more beginner-friendly language than Java (which is what OpenAudible--which is open source--is written in) and Xcode tries to make app development so easy, it seems like that would be a good place to begin (and if I need to expand to PC and/or non-Apple devices later, I can figure that out after I have my app built.)

The problem is, the internet is glutted right now with people trying to sell books and beginner courses to wanna-be app developers who are looking to make money in the app market. Which is awesome for them, but it makes it hard to find "my tribe" as it were, of people who are creating this sort of software for the love of it and want to help other people learn for the love of it as well. And I'm singularly intimidated by the thought of asking Serious Business Programmers for help when they're trying to make money and I'm just trying to learn enough to fill a void I see in one of my favorite areas of interest.

There are a lot of free courses out there (most of which are being made free in an effort to lure people into buying the books/courses) but honestly there are so many that I don't know where to focus and which one is going to get me where I need to go. Or if any of them are.

So...where does a person with social anxiety go to find a friendly, patient coding Yoda to help scratch a hobby-driven itch rather than attempting to make something to sell?