Adding to the excellent responses so far, I would add 2 recommendations:
Read other people's posts here and see if you can solve the challenges. Don't worry about being fast or even posting anything, but that will give you some very good practical challenges, and you can compare your answers to those of monks. Obviously, don't waste time on poorly phrased questions -- you'll learn how to spot those quickly.
A good source of basic math challenges is https://projecteuler.net/about. That'll give you some things to try beyond "hello world".
Once you've got some basics down, feel free to post code here for critiques.
#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.
