A place I found to be extremely helpful is chatting over IRC, I've helped others and been helped myself, the best one I've found is the #programming channel on LiberaChat.

There's usually not much to do apart from practicing, I highly recommend to ignore books and whatnot and stick to simpler tutorials, the actual code experience and first hand experimentation should be what you need to prioritize.

If you still need to choose a language, Python and JavaScript are the best to begin with, Python is a good option for understanding the general syntax while JavaScript, apart from being a bit more verbose, is the simplest to work with as you just need to press F12 and go to the "Console" tab on any browser to have a fully working live environment.

For the kind of software you might want to start with, I think videogames are the best type, they let you have immediate feedback and most bugs are easy to notice without even looking at the code (like a character moving to the opposite direction of what you intended), it also help to write code that's made to be simpler and faster than other type of software, as performance and the resources are easier to handle (drawing a square on a screen is much simpler that building a web app with a database).

Those are advices based on my personal experience and I've used the same approach to teach others at work where I work as a web developer fulltime for years, I have never went to any specialized schools, never paid for any online courses or book, I just used random videos and played around by myself.

I've written some time ago a collection of advice for beginners here on SN: #360597

But, as I got swept up with private stuff, I halted it at that. Now, seeing your post alongside others with a desire to least to code, I think what I can share can help many people greatly, so I'll try to get back to work back on it soon.