Concepts, the Leonardo of Programming

If you don't understand "what" you're trying to do, it's going to be very difficult to write code and/or tests for it.

Learning concepts can be difficult, some of the main things you need to think about "conceptually" is breaking any task down into 3 parts,

1. Initialization
2. Code that does the actual work (algorithm)
   
3. Exiting

For initialization you can look most of the things up in the user's manual, once you know how to setup the actions you will be using, you can then begin to look at what you're actually wanting to do, which brings us to algorithms.

Algorithms are "how" you're going to accomplish the task you're attempting to complete. My favorite method is drawing it out in a flowchart design. But I have to "see" what I'm doing and that's one way of doing it, once you've managed to really nail this idea down, you can frequently just do it in your head, and reserve doing flow chart's for the more difficult designs that you really can't wrap your head around.

If you don't know your algorithm it's much like trying to write a paragraph about a subject that hasn't been given to you, you'll keep writing and rewriting your paragraph until you finally get the subject, but that doesn't seem very efficient now does it? Figure out your subject (or what you're trying to do) and THEN write the paragraph, much like figuring out your algorithm FIRST then code up the solution, this prevents large quantities of re-writing code.

Finally when you've finished your task, are there any "clean up tasks" that you need to complete? Do you need to return the register's to their original values? Do you need to clear out memory so that another operation doesn't accidentally use data you've shoved out there? Do you need to pop the stack? These are all things you need to answer when you've finished the task your algorithm is attempting to complete.