Honestly, there's only so much you can really get out of those kinds of courses.
I've been programming for 10+ years, went to school for it even. But a lot like the lessons on business, sometimes you need to just throw the hand-holding lessons out the window and dive in.
When you take those programming courses, you really just follow along, you type the same code the instructor tells you to. Sure there's a small section where they tell you to 'figure out what to code next' but that's after an entire lesson of showing you how to use the code you'll be typing anyways.
I spent my first few years following the instructor-guided path. At the end of it I was freaking awesome at following instruction, but ask me to figure out how to program something? Heck no.
I realized this and so I started to essentially teach myself how to code. I would come up with something I wanted to code; a calculator, a sorting algorithm, a stopwatch/timer/alarm clock, or anything I could think of. I would write out the pseudocode for it then I would just kinda figure it out. It was hard, especially at first with a lot of visits to Google and Stack Overflow, but after a while it just got easier as I got more and more familiar with the nuances of that particular language.
I should note that I'm proficient at multiple languages, including c++ and I've used this method each time. It gets easier the more you do it to the point where it doesn't matter what programming language you use, the fundamentals are the same.
That's my advice, ditch the guided instruction, it can be a slog but it's worth it. Don't take the shortcut of looking for the coded solution, but stumble your way through and you'll come out the other side ludicrously better educated and savvy than the programmers that can just follow instructions really good.
I've been programming for 10+ years, went to school for it even. But a lot like the lessons on business, sometimes you need to just throw the hand-holding lessons out the window and dive in.
When you take those programming courses, you really just follow along, you type the same code the instructor tells you to. Sure there's a small section where they tell you to 'figure out what to code next' but that's after an entire lesson of showing you how to use the code you'll be typing anyways.
I spent my first few years following the instructor-guided path. At the end of it I was freaking awesome at following instruction, but ask me to figure out how to program something? Heck no.
I realized this and so I started to essentially teach myself how to code. I would come up with something I wanted to code; a calculator, a sorting algorithm, a stopwatch/timer/alarm clock, or anything I could think of. I would write out the pseudocode for it then I would just kinda figure it out. It was hard, especially at first with a lot of visits to Google and Stack Overflow, but after a while it just got easier as I got more and more familiar with the nuances of that particular language.
I should note that I'm proficient at multiple languages, including c++ and I've used this method each time. It gets easier the more you do it to the point where it doesn't matter what programming language you use, the fundamentals are the same.
That's my advice, ditch the guided instruction, it can be a slog but it's worth it. Don't take the shortcut of looking for the coded solution, but stumble your way through and you'll come out the other side ludicrously better educated and savvy than the programmers that can just follow instructions really good.