Hey so I am just getting into programming and I just want to ask a question for you programmers out there.

Do you actually know in your memory what most of your coding you are doing is? Whether it be a big project or anything do you ever have to use a book/google to figure out how to do something?

I am more curious because I have the mindset that I should be able to do everything without ever having to look something up and this is more for me to know if I am just setting my need to know way to high or whatever. Thanks in advance to anyone who responds!

You will ALWAYS be referencing documentation, books, manuals, etc during your programming career. APIs are so big these days no mere mortal can remember everything. It's also completely normal to need to refresh your memory on certain programming techniques as well.

Being a good programmer is NOT about memorization... you can memorize, say, the entire Win32 API and still be a lousy Win32 programmer... a good programmer knows how to design his/her software and turn those designs/ideas/concepts into good, working, maintainable and modular/reusable code. It's more like painting a picture than memorizing the answers to a math test.