I can relate to your sentiment. But note that your problems have very little to do with learning how to program, and everything to do with needing to navigate t

I can relate to your sentiment. But note that your problems have very little to do with learning how to program, and everything to do with needing to navigate the high buy-in tax of learning all of this tooling before first building a simple site. I HIGHLY, HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend you give Steve Huffman's course on "Introduction to Web Development" at Udacity at shot. Unlike virtually every single resource I have found, Steve does a great job of explaining the basics of the infrastructure of how a website works while you are implementing it at the same time. Also, since he does it on Google App Engine, 100% of the "tooling" you will need will simply be installing the app engine runtime. I've found that it is a fantastic introduction to programming for the web. It will give you a solid understanding of the basic infrastructure, and you will then have a good mental model onto which you can slowly graft the many other tools that developers use when making a site. I felt exactly like you did - and in my case, I had even programmed some in college but found it hopeless when trying to make a "real" product. Today I weave between backend and frontend technologies, preprocessors for my styling, grunt, etc. -- all of the stuff that I was put off by at first. And I'm confident it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't taken that course first.