Why not try simple scripts at first? You could write a little script in Bash, JS, or Ruby to create folders or text files. Besides the very basic stuff I did on the high school robotics team, my first programming project was when I worked as a print broker and we invested in a digital press. I needed a program to calculate the cost of a print job, so I learned a little BASIC and wrote a program on my TI-98 to do it for me. It would ask a series of questions (eg - paper cost, single / double sided, color / black and white, how many imposed on an SRA3 sheet, etc) and spit out the cost of the job.

As for how you use the code, say you write a ruby script; to run it, you'd navigate to the script directory in the terminal and type ./scriptName.rb to run it. If you're using a compiled language, you'd compile it (your lessons would cover how to do this) and then you'd run the resulting binary the same way.