My advice is to find a good set of tutorials and start ripping them apart. In another comment I mentioned Three.js is a great way to get up and running fast. WebGL has limitations but the ease of development pays off especially if you are just learning.
TBH does not matter what versions you use too much. I am still using one of the older shader versions (1.2 or 1.3) but I will probably upgrade just because there is not a major downside to using a newer version.
Lighting and shadows vary everywhere and there is no best way, just depends on your use case. Cascaded shadow maps are quite common in high-quality, polygon-based pipelines. Commercially, GPU ray tracing is very rare, if for no other reason than the tooling is just not there like it is for polygons.
Ultimately, no fast path - you just take it one step at a time starting with simple goals and you will ultimately get there. Even a year of hobby development will make a dramatic difference in your understanding, but the payoff is slower from there.
My advice is to find a good set of tutorials and start ripping them apart. In another comment I mentioned Three.js is a great way to get up and running fast. WebGL has limitations but the ease of development pays off especially if you are just learning.
TBH does not matter what versions you use too much. I am still using one of the older shader versions (1.2 or 1.3) but I will probably upgrade just because there is not a major downside to using a newer version.
Lighting and shadows vary everywhere and there is no best way, just depends on your use case. Cascaded shadow maps are quite common in high-quality, polygon-based pipelines. Commercially, GPU ray tracing is very rare, if for no other reason than the tooling is just not there like it is for polygons.
Ultimately, no fast path - you just take it one step at a time starting with simple goals and you will ultimately get there. Even a year of hobby development will make a dramatic difference in your understanding, but the payoff is slower from there.