First things. First, you're going to want to build sensitivity in your fingers, if you are serious about reading braille. Yes, you could read it visually, but as it's not designed for that, you'll likely have a harder time of it, especially at first. Also you cannot read braille on both sides of a page visually. There are print/braille books for children as well as some books that have pages of varying sizes of objects for you to get used to feeling with your fingers. Slate and stylus is cheap for writing. You can get a full-page slate for $20 or so and some paper to write on for $5 or thereabouts. I wouldn't think of it as "writing backwards" though. Yes, that's sort of what's going on, but it's a lot easier to remember that each window has the first half of the cell as dots 1 2 and 3 and the second half as 4 5 and 6. That should avoid screwing up your brain. Also the software that lets you braille into a computer using a braille keyboard is called PerkyDuck. It's good software, but you're going to want a good mechanical keyboard as these stupid modern foam rubber ones typically don't do well at corded keypresses. Something like an IBM Model M, or DAS keyboard. But anything mechanical should be decent. There are a few online braille courses, but I'm not sure what would be best for you as I learned it as my only writing system when I was very tiny to begin with and have just picked up what I needed since then.

have a go at the uebonline.org site. It's a great way of learning at your own pace.
If you are sighted, perhaps get yourself a printout of the basic code first, but like with touch-typing, you don't want to use it whilst typing for ever.

There's also software you can use for braille entry on a computer - the name escapes me right now but if nobody comes back I'll do so later.

Good luck.

Sorry for being slow on this.

The software $1 will let you
use 6 keys of your computer’s home row to enter Braille – fds for the left hand
(dots 123), and jkl for the right (456). You will be able to open and save
Braille files using this tool.

If you need a way of getting bits of text into Braille, try Send To Braille,
from APH. It’ll let you send a text file, word document etc to be converted. You
can open that up in perky and see it onscreen, or use it to compare your own
input.

Hadley school/institute for the blind has a distance learning program.

There's a good UEB Braille Chart available here if you want a good resource as well! $1

I’m also a sighted person wanting to learn Braille. I have some learning materials but so far my biggest problem is being able to feel the difference between the different letters/dot positions... any advice?

There’s a website UEB online which teaches and lets you practice

Braille is like other writing system memory look up the dot formations and try to reduplicate them. There may be some resources on the american printing house site maybe? There are actually books and charts to teach you on the internet. My father found one. How much money are you willing to spend, there are braille type writers out there and it’s about 700 to 800 dollars you can get one of those and just practice typing over and over again, drilling it in your head.

Alternatively this is the more basic and much cheaper option, the problem is you have to write backwards and read forwwards I am still relatively slow at it. Get yourself a slate and stylus and learn to write braille backwards and then read it forwards.