Learning to Program

Hi,

I want to learn to program. I started several years ago working at my father's shop and built him an e-commerce store using OpenCart. Now, I've done a little of playing around with code, and I love it. I want to become a professional programmer. The problem is I find it so hard to apply what I'm learning. In learning everything seems clear and straightforward, but when programming I have no clue where to start. I really could use some advice. What do you recommend for a novice beginner? I started coursework a few months ago on CodeCademy.

I am also starting with opencart development...
After playing around a little to understand how it works, I setup very simple target to begin with : write an extension that would display 'Hello world' in the backend !
It will split in understanding how an extension is packaged (Difficult part is it's dependant of the OC version) and writing the code.
This last part split itself in understanding how MVC works which is more of a theoretical part and learning specific OC code.
In each case your friend are plenty of free extensions that already exist in the marketplace that you could easily download and study
Then step by step you increase your initial target...
Add a form, Use the frontend, read data from the DB,...
All this - needless to say - on a training version of your server
HTH