Different things workout for different people. I was overwhelmed by so many ways to do things in Python and everybody teaching their own favourite way of doing things. Similarly, all I was learning was the syntax and no problem solving skills.

Then I cam across the book How to Design Programs aka HTDP. I was skeptical at first. But I eventually started and worked through the second edition of the book available freely at https://www.htdp.org .

It was so beautiful. The teaching languages and writing examples before writing code. It made me really understand programming.

Now I can pick up any language (not that I become a language expert overnight) in a short time. I only need to map the concepts to this new language. And that's that. I can even pattern match my ideas from higher order functions to imperative looping constructs.

I have another book in to TDR list. It is Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming.