I started to learn chess when I was about 12, and stopped by the time I was 14. I was playing a game of chess with my younger brother, when I took his queen off the board, he cleared the remaining pieces with one swoop of his arm and that was the end of playing chess between us. It would be nice after these decades to see if I could get him to try the game again.
I have tried to play at various points, and with computer chess I found I could always start a game; I rarely ever get past the opening - much less win a game. So I have wanted to learn how to play better - and I have dozens of books - but only one of them have I actually read cover to cover - and that took months.
I discovered the free software Arena, a number of years ago, and that comes with a few "Chess Engines". From their site I found that there are other free chess engines, and a few commercial ones. Once you have installed Arena (i am on windows) you just have to locate the exe for the engine and drag-and-drop the exe on the GUI and it will install the engine; I tend to drop the zip file into the engine folder of Arena and then install it from there.
Some of the engines I recently installed
Fire 7.1
Stockfish 10
Komodo 9
Andscacs (july 2018)
There are a number of sites that spend time getting these engines to compete, ChessOwl is one, and ComputerChess is another that I came across. If the number that these sites show for ratings are accurate - I might not win a game for a very long time, and with a lot of work and losses to learn from.
I did run a short Tournament in Arena to find the weakest of the Engines (AnMon 5.75, then SOS 5.1 a bit higher) - so that I give myself a better chance of winning to start.
I did one game of Engine against engine Stockfish 10 against the Andscacs - where the Andscacs engine beat Stockfish in 91 moves and predicted checkmate 17 moves ahead. (the Andscacs site is in Spanish - the engine seems first rate though).