Man, every time I see this I feel like I somehowed failed in my self-learning. I went through "beginning programming for dummies" back in middle school (checked

Man, every time I see this I feel like I somehowed failed in my self-learning. I went through "beginning programming for dummies" back in middle school (checked out at my local library), running around in the win95 version of QBASIC. Then I looked at C++, through "C++ for dummies" (could barely understand pointers), and spent so much time trying to figure out how anything worked. I remember coming up with state machines to run little critters in a game I was trying to make, as well as writing up a UI library(with click listeners) in the beginning of high school, before people introduced me to those concepts. It was really fun to write the first time. Now I feel a bit stupid not putting these things into google, but I was on an old computer without internet access. I spent a lot of time in high school goofing off in Actionscript too, looking around and copy-pasting code from the Newgrounds forums. In the end, after 5 years of doing this I was still pretty worthless. Granted this was very much a part time hobby, but seeing people roll up so quickly is neat.