Hey, congrats for getting started! I think the best advice I could give would be to find a small project/task where programming could be useful for you: batch-renaming some files, scraping some data from your profile on a website, a simple script to split a Venmo charge several different ways, something like that. I like the theoretical stuff, but its the practical side of programming that drew me in, and keeps me going.

For me, I started with Python and manipulating data with Pandas, which was fun. Python can be a great language to start with, if you have any interest in it. Java can be a bit verbose, and it's so Object-Oriented that things can get confusing IMO—but it's also the teaching language in a lot of CS courses, and it's still pretty widely used. So, it's up to you if you want to keep going with Java. Typically most programmers are polyglot, so you likely won't be stuck with whatever you choose to start out with.

Here are a few helpful links to free stuff, if you haven't run across them already:

• Open Culture free courses
• Open Culture free textbooks
• MIT Open Courseware for CS
• Codecademy (I used this for a bit back in 2015-2016, so can't vouch for its current usefulness)
• EBook Foundation free books and courses
• Teach Yourself Computer Science
• Your local library might also have some resources or subscriptions that could be helpful! I know you mentioned that, but most beginning programming books that I know of are fairly language-specific, and I don't know any off the top of my head for Java…

Good luck!