Learning Programming

Trying to learn programming is very daunting as there are a lot of things out there to learn but most of the time we do not know where to start and where to continue. Ususally, we are used to the structured nature of our education system where we know after learning A, we learn B, then to C and so on. However, when trying to learn on our own, such structures do not exist and we will have to find out on our own. It is either we take a major/minor in Computer Science or we ask someone who has experence to guide us. For now, it is hard for people to guide if they do not know what exactly you want to do. Do you want to learn Web, app making and so on? Different things uses different languages and you will have to start somewhere. A good thing about university is that it forces engineering student to learn basic C so that we can understand other languages more easily. However, trying to proceed from there seems daunting to me as I myself do not know what I want to do and hence what I need to learn Do I learn everything? (Quite impossible given the limited time that I have.)

I have tried to do some programming with my friend but I realised that what seemed easy to him is very hard for me as I totally do not understand how the thing works. Reading documentation is not helping when I do not understand. I really wonder how am I supposed to be able to catch up to at least be good enough to understand and do some simple code rather than just googling and copy pasting without really understanding the code. (This is a bad habit of mine) Also, sometimes people just conveniently say, "just google". Yes, googling may be the fastest way to go about it but sometimes, when you google something, you are unsure if it is the right thing other than trying it and wasting a lot of time, also, when you google, you might realised you don't know another 1,000 things and more googling is done and you get more confused. I might sound whiny but I do feel that even though a lot of people struggled through by googling and learning through googling, it will take too much time when there is little time available.

So now here I am confused and don't know where to start. Some of the introduction courses are too easy, and I am not sure how to proceed from here. However, I will try to commit time to learn (hopefully). This is the future, if we do not follow the current trend, future generations will overtake us and we will find ourselves useless in the job market as the younger generations are exposed to programming in school.