I’d recommend just looking at examples, making something and then just reading through the wiki and the forums while looking for solutions. At least that’s how I started developing with LÖVE. ^^

Like you, when I was still using Windows, I once bought Game Maker. I spent a month with it and forgot about it: 1) Having to depend on some black magic box was unbearable. 2) I would have had to give more money to solve the deployment problem through yet another better (more expensive) version of GM. For that same reason, I have since kept away from all these alluring nice engine (Construct2, Unity…). You make a game in no time, with hardlly any code. Great! Your game will look and feel alike so many other ones. But you’ll have to obey by their rules and when they change them you’re stuck and either have to pay more money or have to start elsewhere again. Go for any MAINSTREAM programming language: C++, Java…. Even scripting languages such as Python or Ruby also work. With regard to solving once for all the deployment issue: the HTML5/JavaScript pair can take you a long way. Indeed, JavaScript is not easy. The language is a minefield. But when it comes to asynchronous and event-based programming (and games are nothing else), JavaScript is unfortunately a good choice. You will also find many game-libraries: CreateJS, Phaser… If, like me, you hate JavaScript when using it, you can used something like CoffeeScript and make your programming experience more like Python or Ruby.