After reading digital fundamentals, I spend the next months writing assembly language programs. That is, it's assembly, the programs were fairly simple, many, many, many pages long, and I think I completed a grand total of two.
With that new-found confidence, I went back to C, and immediately got lost again. I had this mental block where I just couldn't fully trust what the language was really doing. At this point, though, I took a few small sample programs, compiled them into assembly language, and printed out the results.
Sure this was an ugly way to do it, but once I was fully able to trace the C function, printf (which prints to the screen with optional formatting), everything became so much more clear.
I decided to write a simple game. A Klondike Solitaire program with basic graphics and mouse support. At the time, mouse support required some direct assembly language sections in the C program. Surprisingly, this didn't take me long to do, I had the mouse support working in a week of evenings.
No longer embarrassed by how lost I had been, I showed my mentor Norm what I was was doing, and - to be sure - he gave me a few tips. After a few months, I got the game working. It's major feature is that it could detect if the wrong card was being placed, and force the cards to the original position. There were two features that I wanted, but never added to it. It would not auto-complete (automatically move cards up to the Aces piles), and it didn't detect a WIN.
As an aside, I lost the source for this after my first hard drive crash. Otherwise, I would love to embarrass myself by showing how terribly sloppy the code was.
At the company I worked, there were about a dozen people who worked with me in the operations group. Of those, at least 9 of them were taking actual college courses for computer programming, while I was teaching myself at home.
One day, maybe three months after I stopped working on that Solitaire program, there was an open call to the Operators to submit a program they had written for an open programming position. I think this was mid 1995, and I submitted my Solitaire game.
Every other person who applied had all gone to the same C programming course, and they all turned in the same thing: their final assignment. It was a data-storing sales record system, the kind that looks like the made-up example in How to Write SQL books. I turned in Solitaire, complete with Borland Graphics Interface library graphical playing cards (that I had hand-drawn in binary strings).
I was directly told by the hiring manager that my style was terrible, and I would have to work on that, but I was given the job. Sometimes, it pays to have something different.