Hello all,
I am seeking resources that will help me evolve my LED programming skills. Anyone have what im looking for? Books, tutorials, websites, etc
Do you already have programming experience in general?
Are are specifically wanting to learn more about using the FastLED library? If so continue on…
Have you read the wiki yet?
Search out example programs and study them and make tweaks to see how it changes the display.
https://gist.github.com/search?utf8=✓&q=fastled
https://pastebin.com/search?q=fastled
Put code you’re having problems with on http://gist.github.com and share the link in a post and ask specific questions in in the G+ community.
You can also check out these docs for the code.
http://fastled.io/docs/3.1/modules.html
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend going through the FastLED examples and trying to fully understand what each of them are doing. Make small changes to them, see what happens, repeat.
Next, start going through the other code shared here in the FastLED community. Mark Kriegsman’s examples here are fantastic: https://gist.github.com/kriegsman
Good luck!
Marc really knows his stuff. That’s where you start and there’s also the Arduino Programming reference at:
Lol, as usual, @marmil beat me to it, and said about the same thing. 
Assuming that you already have some programming experience, one thing you might want to level-up on is the idea of State Machines. If you have any kind of project where you want the LEDs to do different things based on certain conditions, or sequence of events, having at least some basic SM knowledge is often helpful.
Also, you probably want to forget about using delay() functions, and find some of the various timer libraries that abstract timing out in ways that are more friendly to the timing-critical operation of LEDs.