@uniqueideaman let me start by saying that I admire your ambitious goals, your self confidence, and your perseverance. I can also relate to your frustrations.
When I started writing code it was BASIC that I read from a book and typed into the CLI (all the computer was at that time was like one big MS-DOS prompt window). The process was tedious and very unforgiving of even the slightest typo. But I learned the hard way to be meticulously careful.
When I started writing HTML (in plain old Notepad) I looked at various pages view-source to see how others wrote their HTML. I used <br> tags to create spacing and <h#> tags based on how I wanted the text to look. I used proprietary I.E. markup and didn’t know why the pages looked poor in Netscape. Essentially, I was working backwards, I was thinking first of how I wanted things to be but did not understand what was needed to get there. Eventually I realized that I could make faster progress when I broke complex things down into smaller simpler pieces and put them together to make the whole.
This is the approach I adopted when I started to write PHP code and still follow to this day. For example, I scribble a messy outline of what I want an app to do in English and pseudocode.
- page loads
- not logged in - show log in form
- (eventually) use JavaScript to display input problems
- send input values to processing file
- if (OK){ return data to page and display it }
- logged in - show data
When I get done doing all the crossing out, arrows pointing to insert locations etc. I write a neater copy of the steps. Then, working one step at a time, I translate my outlined steps into real code, and test it as thoroughly as I can to make sure everything is copacetic before I proceed to the next step.
I’m not saying that the way I learn and write code would be best for others. But it is obvious that you are having problems learning the way you are trying to learn now.
I think in large part the problems you are having now are similar to the problems I had back when I started. That is, you are attempting to do too much all at once.