[ianai]

I’m always skeptical of telling people to not just try something out in programming. Yes, don’t just try to code up the next unix without knowing any c. But definitely getting your hands dirty isn’t going to instill any super bad mental/coding practices.

[acomjean]

You can learn by playing around, but its very helpful to have a guide in the begining.

I had to start coding for work in C and without some good footing it was frustrating dealing with older code and creating new things with my very limited experience. (I had c++ which isn't the same.)

Having spent a week going a book and getting up to speed helped greatly and increased my enjoyment, reduced my frustration fwiw.