medical student/programming amateur

[oelgazzar]

Hi, everyone .. I'm Omar from Egypt
I'm a medical student but I love programming a lot, I learned C++ [read a lot of material] so I could consider myself not a very beginner i.e. I'm familiar with the language.
I also read some Qt learning material ..
but I sometimes find it overwhelming and give up when things get complicated, and I say to myself why I'm even learning programming ..
but I love programming .. I like the idea of creation, design and problem-solving..
I thought maybe I would be able to create some helpful apps for studying, for example, or in my clinic in the future :)

So, why am I writing this?
I want your advice, how do you see this? Should I go on or give up?
and if go on, what I should do to be a good amateur programmer e.g. some resources

Thanks in advance
and excuse my bad English; not my native language.. sorry

[helios]

If you like it then there's no reason to stop.

Since you're programming for pleasure, it's not unreasonable to abandon a project you don't enjoy working on, or that you feel is going nowhere. Programming is, besides a creative endeavor, an engineering endeavor. An engineering project should consider the cost-benefit ratios of the various available solutions and pick one that is suitable to the problem in question. Dropping a solution because you've realized it's too complex to be worth the trouble is often the correct decision.
On the other hand, consider the gratification from seeing a project all the way to the end. What I've found works to keep me consistent is working on projects that will yield a final product I want to use. My last three projects have been an audio player for Android, an image viewer, and now a backup utility for Windows. These are all things I wanted but couldn't find an alternative that fulfilled all my requirements.

[oelgazzar]

thanks @helios,
and since you're -obviously- an actual programmer, can you recommend to me a specific way to be a good programmer as you are.

[helios]

Practice makes perfect, as with everything else.

[Cody0023]

It's not bad to be overwhelmed. If anything it might show that you see things accurately regarding the time it takes to learn the material. GUI will take time to learn and even a longer time to be really good at it.

I am also currently working on an audioplayer for android. Functionality is there but design is no where near professional aesthetically speaking. You have to keep learning and not stop.

[dhayden]

I've talked to students about programming for a living before. One of the things that I stress is that very few programmers do generic programming. Instead, most of us are programing in a field like communications, automation, retail, automotive, aviation, etc. etc. The point is that if you have a side interest, you can usually combine it with programming, sometimes very effectively.

So now many doctors are programmers? Probably not many. If you decide that you don't want to practice medicine, you might find a very lucrative career in the medical software industry.