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.
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.