That is the point I'm making: start small, make useless programs and see results quickly. If you start from scratch, trying to tackle something big will only f

That is the point I'm making: start small, make useless programs and see results quickly. If you start from scratch, trying to tackle something big will only frustrate you because there's too many things you need to learn before you can get a complex program up and running. No one needs a program that outputs the listing of a directory, but if you can get that working, then that's a huge accomplishment, especially for someone that hasn't taken formal programming classes.