If it frustrates you so, why are you trying to do it that way?

It doesn’t matter what or how. You can’t learn anything without motivation.

If this method is not motivating for you, find one that is.

It seems to me that you are just trying to go this route because you somehow calculated that this is the best way.

Lesson in life: The best way is always the way most suitable to you. And in your case it is obviously not by reading.

I wanted to give a generalized answer first because it is the most important lesson in life you can ever learn: Learn how to learn.

For your specific task, programming generally is better-learned hands-on. In fact most things are.

And in your case, it’s obvious. Put the book down and start coding.

L. Spiro

And this has been another "Lesson in Life, with L. Spiro"

[spoiler]Yes, that a compliment. You've been on a roll with the excellent post. Lately, I've been compelled to upvote all your posts I come across.[/spoiler]

I find that non-technical books are quite a different beast than technical books. So I wouldn't compare reading a Harry Potter book with reading a programming book.

You have to stop quite often to review things, or to research something with technical books. Something you would do with other kind of books if say, you didn't knew half the words in them, but you probably know English pretty well so you don't have those issues with Harry Potter.

With the programming book instead, you often read them because you actually don't know half of the things the book mentions, so it is expected that it takes more time to read it. It's just a different kind of read. That's all.

If it's a good book (based on my personal definition of "good"), it should have a few questions and practical exercises after each chapter. If you can get yourself to actually want to solve these exercises, skip to the end and read them first.

Personally, if what I read isn't directly related to a task I need to solve, then my attention is low and you basically force yourself to read stuff you don't care about. Once you can see how it directly relates to something you want to do, it magically becomes a lot more interesting.

Also: doing is the most important part. Example: I read a lot about git, all the theory and how you usually do things. In the end all I had was a confused understanding of weird trees and some magical recipes how to do things. Which were useless the moment something didn't work as expected and left me pretty helpless. Once I started actually working with it and had to solve some actual real life issues, reading about it again suddenly made much more sense and I started to "get it".

Let me put it to you this way.

You don't know what to write until you have read.

but you don't know what you read until you write.

You may be right about me calculating this approach to learning, only because that was the best solution I found to learning, or attempt to understand c++. My frustration is not with programming or anything like that but with what I myself view as a lack of progress, maybe from someone else's prospective i'm doing totally fine, but i feel like I'm not getting anywhere, that is wear my frustration lies, I am totally motivated to learn, I just don't know what approach to take, and the current one I am following just bores me to death. On the flip side I feel like my not competent enough to approach coding on my own, because I still feel like a totally nub. Maybe I'm over-thinking this but I feel that if I keep doing it that way I am currently doing it I will never get anywhere.

Stop the book, I have had this issue myself during my undergraduate years and I had to do a step back to a more practical approach (even switched schools, uni to college did end up with an MSc in the end though). I understood all of the theoretical stuff just lacked the vision to apply what I was reading to an actual programming task. Once I realised how to solve problems in a programming language syntax, the rest just slotted in place. I am still catching up with a lot of stuff right now but that's more out of my interest and your reading attention and interest then also changes, I found the open course from MIT and Standford to be really interesting to watch as well.

Coding is a lot of reading of other peoples code and syntax of the language to be honest, which is often best approached by taking some ones code and modifying it to do what you want it to do.

Hello, you might feel stucked because you lack some fundation in programming. At your age, when I attempted to write a simple Tetris, I didn't had the basic knowledge (algorithmic, data modelling and processing, etc...) and thus struggled for weeks to write what would take me up to a few hours now. And it was in basic, not c++.

So, I would recommand to get those fundations first.

And also, don't try to use all the feature of c++ at once.

Hope this helps.

I have a hard time reading programming books -- especially to learn a language. Learning a first language from a book, I think, is basically impossible. What you need to do is

1. find a good book (Don't know if C++ Though Game Programming is good or bad -- but I do know there are more bad programming books in the world than good so be careful and listen to what other people say regarding book selection)
2. read the beginning chapters over and over to get you to the point at which you can get something on the screen, something slightly more than Hello World.
3. Put the book down for a long time. Weeks.
4. Try to program something. Use the internet when you get stuck but don't just cut-and-paste other people's code. (In fact, when you are learning a first language, never cut-and-paste code)
5. When you get really stuck, pick the book back up.
6. Repeat.

I don't know what it would be like to start out now. When I was learning how to program things were different. My generation started out with BASIC built into our computers when we were 8 years old and then learned Pascal in high school and then switched to C and assembly at some point. By the time we started to learn C++ we had been programming for years literally. I don't know what it would be like to start with C++ but I think it would be hard.

I think the key thing is you need to replicate the period that for me was playing around with BASIC. You need to play around with programming for a while and then getting serious about it just happens natually.