Okay, I seem to get it. Originally it seemed to me like: "I want to know everything without having to actually understand everything (just give me the most important bits and I will memorize them)."
But now I guess you simply want the information well-ordered, meaning that if you invest e.g. 100 hours of your time into learning, you get the most value anyone could get from 100 hours. Where "value" could mean perhaps: how useful it would be for average programmer's average task.
Two possible issues:
1) Maybe sometimes specialization provides better results. For example in 20 hours you could learn how to declare variables in 1000 programming languages, or... well, something else, that would be connected with what you already know, and would allow you to do some useful new thing. (Because knowing to declare variables in 1000 programming languages is rather useless.) So you could have different specialization paths. Perhaps too many of them.
Possible real-world examples: Using many programming languages / many frameworks, or becoming good at one or two of them. Learning many different things (algorithms, databases, GUI, networks, cryptography, etc.), or becoming a specialist for e.g. databases (or even e.g. Oracle databases).
2) Maybe it is important to know in advance how much time do want to spend totally. For example, let's say that knowing an information A can bring you $1000 profit, information B can bring you $500, information C can bring you $200, but a combination of B+C can give you $2000. If you know at the beginning that you will take two lessons, you can take B and C, which gives you $2000. But if you go incrementally, the best choice for the first lesson is A, then the best choice for the second lesson is B, giving you only $1500.
Possible real-world examples: If you want to spend one day or one week learning, just learn Excel. If you want to spend one year, learn Python, or perhaps Java or C#. If you want to spend 10 years, learn mathematics, formal languages, computational complexity, and at the end apply the knowledge to the programming language(s) or your choice. -- In other words: the more time you have, the more meta you can go.
I have seen people starting with PHP, because it provided useful results after ten minutes; only to hear them complaining a few years later than they can't keep up with all the new PHP frameworks, but they are scared to death from switching to another language. On the other hand, I have seen people who study theoretical computer science for years, but they would have problem to write a simple calculator app -- but also they don't need to, as they make money writing theoretical papers; and they would be able to make the calculator after a 3-days course in one language (and after a single 2-weeks course they could do it in 10 or 20 languages).
Software developers have to repeatedly and continually learn massive number of new concepts, procedures and techniques related to the latest languages, frameworks and technologies up and down the stack.
The best way to learn would of course be to continuously read books in the spare time one isn't solving problems on the job and apply that knowledge.
I personally find reading books too time consuming for me. Books are presented in a depth first fashion, delving into multiple areas in depth one by one. This is not ideal for becoming productive quickly. There is no explicit ordering of how necessary / frequent a particular concept / technique is either.
What other sources of information / classes of sources are highest yield for picking up new technologies quickly [In the sense of getting productive fast].
An example of a high yield resources are well made slide decks. As an example, a slide deck on a language(e.g. javascript) made for experienced developers new to the language is much faster to process than a book. I can absorb the major features of the language, the syntax etc from a good slide deck in a fraction of the time it would take to read the introductory chapter of a book.
Any general comments (or specific sources) on how one would go about learning a new tech stack quickly would help too.
My current stack is linux, apache, python, django, dynamo, js, backbone