I hear people giving newbies like me advice to keep practicing...my question is what are we practicing? Is it the examples?

Answer 1

The point of learning programming is to write programs.
It doesn't matter what it is: homepages, applications, games, drivers... at some point you want to create something use- or joyful.
And this is something that doesn't just happen, you need to train for it by practicing to solve tasks with code, whatever it is.
There are tons of easy to hard problems, like you find them for example here in Code Coach or Coding Challenges or in many other online places.
Best is to look for your own programming projects that *you* want to do.
Of course, you also need to gradually increase your knowledge and take care that you keep it (best by using it).

Answer 2

Programming is using a language with the most stupid yet the most intelligent person you've encountered.
And just as learning a human language, human interaction, programming needs practice.
The machine doesn't think one bit "for you". It is neither gifted with association nor imagination. It knows numbers, is and isn't, accepts a certain kind of structure and is great at comparing given input.
Human brains work differently.
Besides breaking an idea down into its very core aspects and translating it into numbers and is and isn't's, programming is building up artificial intelligent use of these core-bits respecting the given structures to get the wanted output.
So what are we practicing? Straight and purely forward thinking. It actually doesn't matter what exactly, as long as you do it.
And now the other side of the story:
With a programming language, there have been countless people working and thinking, starting with only 0 and 1 to get as far as a language. So we've already come a long way

Answer 3

I suggest beginning with FizzBuzz
https://www.sololearn.com/post/105678/?ref=app
https://code.sololearn.com/WKKkpq0efxai/?ref=app