[helen842000]

It sounds counter intuitive but don't look at other people's code (yet). It's kinda the equivalent of being in a race, feeling like you're doing well, looking up and seeing those runners miles out in front, feeling panic which causes you to stumble and give up.

Don't do the comparing thing, it only hurts your feelings. Like a pianist diligently practising scales only to give up when they hear Chopin.

I was stuck in the same cycle for a long while re-learning the same things every night. My best pieces of advice would be:-

1)Build increasingly bigger projects that work, are useful and go in some kind of portfolio - this demonstrates your progress when you feel overwhelmed. Much better than churning through a pile of tutorials and exercises.

2)Try tutorials that force independent problem solving - Like Udacity.com. More "find a way to", less "type this out"

3)Get good at noticing when & why you are stuck. Write down things you hear that don't make sense and look them up, ask online/forums etc. Write down what you tried. You can still make progress when stuck. If you're working on a project and you hit a wall - your job is to stop coding and research.

The fact that you keep trying says you're obviously willing to stick at it!

[billswift]

A couple of additional points:

Reading other people's programs doesn't help much because, unless you can find some really small standalone programs, they are going to be too complex for a beginner to learn much from.

Explore variations on the small programs presented in tutorials, try changing things - then try them out to see whether they now work as you expected, if they don't, keep at it until they do. It is never to early to start learning debugging.