I remember having a C64 in the mid to late 80's, and spending HOURS copying program lines from a book into the thing, pressing RUN and have the program error out at like line 264 or something... I'd check the line verbatim and find it perfect.. I didn't know ANYTHING about programming and the book was simply a book instructing what to program, not what each function was.. so I was very angry, frustrated and disappointed, and I had no one to help me figure out what the error was. ... Flash forward 20 some years and I found out it was probably a faulty chip in my C64 that was the actual problem! (explained the graphical errors that at the time I didn't know what they were?)
But such was the early end of my programming career...