I'm impressed you did, I tried to learn the same way when I was younger, (albeit with pirated Borland C++) but never made any headway. Admittedly the library books I had access to were obsolete, and no-one in my rural area of a small country carried decent magazines on the subject.

That said, they did carry BBS magazines which led me eventually into the nascent WWW over the 14.4K modem I saved all my pocket money to buy.

Then I finally managed to access the resources to learn. God bless mailing lists.

I also got stuck on C++. It was (and remains) such a disproportionate pain to compile, which was just too high a hurdle in the days before you could search for your cryptic build errors on the internet.

I was able to fool around with BASIC easily enough, with entire programs provided in magazines like Byte.