Development for Designers

As a designer trying to pick up development for fun (it's Cocoa, lemme 'lone) the biggest issue isn't in basic actions, or classes, or anything else. It was in getting from basic programming concepts to actually making a program do something. It's not inherently clear in a lot of programming books, as they assume a programmer's mindset. How do I get from an idea of what it should do, to something that does it? (It's hard to remember what my frustrations were, since I'm learning the language it's hard to remember what it was like before I knew how to think.)

This type of issue is extremely hard to convey to a programmer, because they know how to take these little bits of logic and build something functional. A lot of programming books are either completely step-by-step or abstract, and it's rare to find one that describes how to use these little legos to build something that works.

With design, I can throw stuff on a board, and mush it around until it looks decent, and go from there. I can do the same with programming, but I never learned how to walk like that so it's hard to prototype classes. (Yeah, I now know to just return a dummy object or whatever.)