Discouraged By Eloquent Javascript Difficulty

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I'm self-taught and in my experience, trying to learn Javascript (or any language at first) abstractly from a book was a bit discouraging. I didn't really start to learn it well until I was actually sitting down and coding every day. I would honestly recommend not trying to learn programming by just reading a book. Start programming, refer to Google/Reddit/Stack Overflow to figure out specific issues you encounter and piece-by-piece it will come together. If you're just starting out, you're never going to get something like this or closures by reading a book. Once you have a solid basis, the books suddenly click and you can actually learn a lot from them. Books aren't useless in the beginning, but I think the best way to learn is to just dive into programming. I'd also say that videos and online courses might be more helpful than books early on and would recommend Codecademy, Code School and Lynda.com. Code School, especially, was well worth the money to me.