I've done a bit of programming before. I'm in a bachelors program for structural engineering, but they only get us to focus on Python.

Python material is so very wordy. I often try to restart from basics, and there's a lot of 'you have to reinstall it and use the pure python version, it's the only way you'll learn it properly' - but I find this way more confusing than using an IDE. I struggle to implement new libraries as well, in my existing IDE (i use spyder). Feels so clunky.

I want to be able to make things i can actually use, practice programming regularly, but I'm really not good at self directed stuff. Or even setting things up, as i tried to explain with the second paragraph. Any pointers towards relevant resources?