I am currently a CS student and some of the resources that I found the most useful are the official tutorials provided by documentation. These are usually written by the language’s authors. For example, let’s consider Python. Python’s official documentation actually has a pretty good tutorial.
In some cases, the language standard and implementations are supported by different entities. For C++, The Standard C++ Foundation is the organization that maintains the C++ standard/specification that is then implemented by others, e.g. GNU, Microsoft, IBM, etc.
Unfortunately, I am not allowed to provide links. But it won’t be difficult to Google “Official Python Tutorial” or “ISOCPP tour.”
Good luck!
Edit: received linking privileges
Official Python Tutorial
The Standard C++ Foundation’s C++ Tour, Getting Started
Also, its worth mentioning the difference between a language’s specification and implementation. A language specification is a formal design document that defines the programming language that is used to write the language. It lays out the syntax and semantics of a programming language.
This specification is used to write the language through the development of either a compiler or interpreter. The language is written in another pre-existing language, for example, in the case of Python, one of its main implementations is written in C and referred to as “CPython” and the when someone downloads and installs Python on their system, they are most likely installing the CPython interpreter.
So a programming language will usually have at least one specification that gets regularly updated and can have multiple implementations. Despite the multiple implementations being written it different languages or perhaps in the same language but in different ways depending on optimizations by the writer, they should satisfy the requirements of the specification and thus achieve standardization.
This is why more advanced programmers, when encountering ambiguity, will often refer to the specification first before diving into the implementation (if open-source).
As a beginning programmer, the specification may present itself as too technical to be useful early on when first learning the language which is why most documentation will include a tutorial or “getting started” section. Technically, these are not part of the specification, but part of the overall documentation.
This pattern of combining the specification with a tutorial to make up part of the overall documentation is repeated throughout software.
If you look up the documentation of most APIs, for example, it will include a brief “getting started” section to help the user hit the ground running.
Here’s an example of the Spotify API:
Web API Tutorial
