Unfortunately this about sums up the current state of 'real world' programming.

Well, I don't think I described it correctly. "Circuitous", I can actually handle -- I thrive on it, in fact. But e.g. setting text in a box to bold, when the package is designed to make that easy, following the book's exact instructions, and getting plain text ... that part bothers me, especially when it's followed up with all the alternate methods that don't work, etc. But it was a long time ago so I don't remember all the details.

If you are trying to learn on your own I'd suggest trying to set yourself the task of writing a simple program to do something fairly clearly defined and then work towards that. Simply reading through open source code (or any third party code) is not something I've found terribly helpful as a learning exercise. More useful is to set yourself the task of fixing a specific bug or adding a specific feature as this will help direct your investigation.

The task I was working on was to have a WYSIWIG html editor but all redefinition and addition of tags, and add features html can't currently do. (Examples: 1. A tag that adds a specified superscript to the tagged text. 2. A tag that generates an arrow that points to some other text.)

I eventually hired someone to write it, but still couldn't understand from it how the code works, and the Visual C# book only touched on the outlines of this, and I ran into the problems I listed earlier.

I also tried to work through some of their existing program examples, like the blackjack one, but i don't remember where that went.