This is the best thing I've seen all day. I love it. Out of curiosity how many images are you generating for each headline until you find one you like?
1) The most frustrating thing about learning how to code for me was getting my IDE or environment set up to work with whatever tutorial or book I was working from. Figuring out what the cryptic compiler errors meant was sometimes insanely difficult.
2) Some of the more helpful things for me were the Head First series of books from O'Reilly (Java and C# in particular), and having a few experienced programmers in real life to talk to. The one thing I seriously could not have done without, no question, is Google.
Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja http://www.manning.com/resig/ has helped me understand some of the more interesting parts of the language (such as functions being first class objects) better.