and all I got was one legitimate response

Generally, people don’t want to do your homework for you- so if you’re on stackOverflow or Reddit, I won’t touch anything that seems like a homework problem.

I spent 2 hours searching for how to create a hashmap from a csv file. Internet had zero answers for me

You need to break this up— you’re engineering, break it into smaller steps: * what’s the csv format? * how do I parse that? (make small programs or functions that do 1 thing to try it out. In this case- give it a string in the right format that parses the string into, maybe, an array…) * how do I read a file into a string or something else useful * how does a hashmap work- write some demo code until you’re used to it and get it * now put it all together * maybe bonus points- how do I use command line arguments to tell my program which csv file to use? * how do I handle bad formats?

Once you’ve got the concept of breaking it into parts and then coding those parts, you can now search them, if necessary, and attack the problem.

showing us already typed out code and droning on about it.

“Why can’t I just write novels, what’s the point in reading great authors?”

is learning programming languages basically self-study?

Yes, but the reason the courses are valuable is that they’ll introduce you to things that are useful but hard to pick up on your own.