The programs I used to write as a kid were really 'useless to others'.. I remember we had these fancy new TRS-80s that they installed in a computer lab when I was in 7th grade that came preinstalled with BASIC. Our teacher - I'll use that term loosely, was actually the school wrestling coach.
I wrote this really elaborate program and loaded on the teacher's computer that emulated a fake TRS-DOS prompt. Whenever he would type out any command, it would spit back complaints and refusals to function. It may have been pointless and mischievous, but all this experimenting really taught me a lot.
All I had for tutorials back in those days was the back pages of PC magazines with long lists of useless programs in various flavors of BASIC. So the tutorials are helpful, but at some point you definitely have to start experimenting and diving in to the deep end of the unknown.
I used to type in some of those programs and learnt a few things from them. I would even try to convert some written for other computers, but the versions of BASIC were different enough to make that tricky, especially if graphics were involved. We operated on a lower level than most programmers these days. No fancy editors or debugging tools.
Yeah, I remember the frustration of finding some cool looking game code that was only in apple flavor, but I had an Atari 800. I would try to translate it but usually fail miserably!