need a little help devloping programing skill

I wrote one program a day. Nothing fancy, but something that could be completed in an hour or so. Perhaps an algorithm, a 'dir' utility, implementation of Bresenham line drawing algorithm, utility to display information about bitmap files, finding an interesting API function, and writing an application to mess around with it....

Had well over 1000 programs made during that time....

It's a good way to get you to focus on one small problem at once, and it keeps you going, since you accomplish something every day. The only condition is that you keep it small, and you do it fast. This way you don't get distracted with featuritis.

Needless to say, the longer running projects took weeks, or months to complete. These were just quick tasks to explore the tidbits I found interesting at the time.

But lesson is, most people start small.

I know it seems daunting when you first learn a programming language, but don't understand yet how to write software with it, but yeah if you start with the most simple games you can think of (guess the number...etc) and most importantly figure out the problems you encounter for yourself, you'll be surprised how quickly it all starts to make sense and how quickly you can advance. I know you're wanting very detailed instructions, but there's not that much to it really. Just start.

thanks guys
just what i was hoping to hear.

I've learned a lot from writing tons of little utilities.

For example, in order to work around intermittent hard drive corruption problems I wrote a program that copies files and verifies that they copied correctly, automatically patching them as necessary. For the same problem I wrote another program that dumps portions of a file in hexadecimal. Another program I wrote compares images to see if they're identical, but ignores any changes in image metadata (this was needed because I don't care about metadata changes and only wanted to verify that the image data itself was not corrupted).

I'm sure you have annoying little problems that you can solve with a program. Of course, you'll want to eventually tackle larger projects, but the little ones are valuable as well for the experience and knowledge you gain from them.

my first game was a text based choose your own adventure style game, that said things like press 1 to investigate press 2 to run away :p

once I learned looping I made a text based RPG I called quest for redundancy quest: the quest for redundancy to make fun of itself as all you did in the game was battle monsters and go back to town