I think a lot depends on what language(s) you're trying to work with, and, more importantly, why you're not clicking with those other tutorials. Heck, it may just be that the language your writing in or tools you're using are just wrong for you. Me (for example)? I have a real blind spot when it comes to Java - i've just never been comfortable with it. But most other languages have come (relatively) easy.

But, in answer to your original question, I've been very impressed with the exercises up at Coding Bat.

I think this also depends on what kind of programming you want to learn. For example, if you're a researcher and just want some quick and dirty functional programming, I think the best way to learn is to just google what you would normally do in the language you want to learn. (i.e. how do I do a monte carlo in python?) If you want to get some good resources for functional programming, software-carpentry has some nice introductory materials, and they put on free 2 day workshops to give people in industry a "crash course" in programming. If you want to pick up object-oriented programming, I would try starting out with Django's tutorial. You get the immediate gratification of building a web-app, and you get your hands dirty in the code immediately.

If web development is your thing scotch.io has some excellent tutorials on making web applications on the javascript stack. You might also want to try vogella's Java tutorials if you want to try java instead.

The Python tutorial is excellent.

I went thru codecademy, onto google's Code School, onto the Ruby Koans, Ruby Monk, Test First Ruby, Odin Project, then went full whack into Viking Code School about 10 months into that, I'm 17 months in programming, ended up going down the Full Stack Rails Dev route. No regrets. HOWEVER; there are new resources coming out every day and it's hard for me to keep up with em. I believe there is one, I can't remember the name, that teaches you just by having you build apps; from complete beginner level. That would be cool.

Well, it really depends on what you want to accomplish with your coding, but if you're really a beginner and just want some basic knowledge then I suggest you learn HTML5 (website structure code) from either codecademy.com (I know, I know) or just from website templates up on github because HTML5 is super easy to learn and very visual. You can have a website you want up and running in no time so it's also very rewarding for people with little patience. It's also a gateway to JavaScript and CSS as well as really any other coding language. Python has some nifty internet tools.

I tried CodeAcademy and didn't like it, so I started playing CodeCombat!! Which is fun! Then I went back to CodeAcademy after a few dozen levels on CodeCombat, and I got a lot more out of it. YMMV?

I would get a book from Murach.com. I've used them a bunch to learn different languages (java, c#, Html/css). They are basically a classroom book. You have assignments at the end of each chapter and get to but what you're reading into use. Also you learn some great programming principles along the way: https://www.murach.com/shop-books/all