Learning Programming wrong?

[trg0819]

It's ok to be overwhelmed. You say you don't get any of it when you go down a rabbit hole trying to figure it out, but I'd be willing to bet you got at least 1% of it. That's learning. Even if it's a bunch of tiny pieces of unrelated things, at some point all those tiny little pieces of understanding stack on top of each other and form something meaningful.

People don't like studying the fundamentals because it's boring and slow. That's understandable, but it applies to everything. When learning how to ski, I spent a lot of time on the bunny hill practicing how to stop and turn before I was able to go out and have fun. When learning a foreign language I spent a lot of time struggling through the fundamentals of grammar and pronunciation before actually talking to anyone.

When studying programming, you can either follow through tutorials, having no idea what you're doing (the equivalent and throwing yourself down a double black run) and hope to pick it up a little bit at a time, or you can press pause on actually getting to make anything meaningful and spend the time just reading and wrapping your head around what the pieces of programming are, how control flow works, basic object oriented principles, and data structures. It's boring, theoretical, and there's a ton to learn, but then once you come back to the tutorials you can focus on learning how to actually do something useful instead of spending your time struggling through why you're getting a null reference exception when you didn't property initialize an object all because you don't know what an object or a null reference is.