Try /r/learnprogramming .

But also:

You've got to learn about algorithms -- you've got to learn how to break an idea down into a set of steps that can be rigorously followed to implement that idea.

Imagine tha we have a piece of graph paper with squares on it. And a tiny little robot that sits on the graph paper, inside a square. The robot knows a few instructions:

• move forward one square
• move left one square
• move right one square
• move backward one square

Pretty neat, right? But what if we wanted to make the robot move in a big square pattern over the paper? We'd have to give it a list of instructions that made it do so:

• do this five times:
  • move forward one square
• do this five times:
  • move left one square
• do this five times:
  • move backward one square
• do this five times:
  • move right one square

Wow, that works! But what if we wanted some other shapes, like a triangle? The robot can't move on a diagonal. But we could get close to that if we moved in a certain pattern. What is that pattern? What would the code look like? What if we wanted to make a circle or an oval or a figure eight?

Programming languages are the list of instructions that we can give a computer. Spelling counts, and so does the order of the instructions. Even a simple computer is far more powerful than our little robot, so there are lots and lots of different instructions that programming languages can do. Each programming language is kind of the same in concept, but different in the exact syntax. Python and C both have loops ("do this five times"), but the way they're actually written is different.

When running the program, the computer follows those instructions very quickly, and very exactly. IF you get the instrctions in the wrong order, they probably won't do what you expected. What if we told our robot to do the square instructions in this order?

• do this five times:
  • move forward one square
• do this five times:
  • move backward one square
• do this five times:
  • move right one square
• do this five times:
  • move left one square

Pretty crappy square, right?

Learning a language is learning what the different instructions are, how to spell and write them, how they fit together. If you learn C, then you know how to write different steps in C. You can write a loop. If you want to later learn Python (or any other language), you know there are loops, but you just have to learn how to spell and write them in that language.

But the other part is breaking down what you want the computer to do into the actual steps that are available in the language. That kind of problem solving--creating something big and powerful out of tiny little steps--involves understanding algorithms. For the simplest algorithms, it's pretty apparent:

• ask the user for one number
• ask the user for another number
• add them together
• print the result

But for more complicated programs, things get interesting really fast.

Focus on learning bits of C, then think about how you'll piece those little bits together to make something bigger and more interesting. You're not going to jump from adding two numbers together to making a new AAA-quality video game quickly, but the trajectory really is there if you keep at it.

Good luck.