It's fairly common for programmers who aren't immediately intoxicated by mathematics to go to university and be interested in but ultimately confused by this stuff. In the workplace, one is relieved that those subjects turn out to usually seem quite divorced from the day to day work of programming.
About 12 months in, you (hopefully) realise that those concepts are actually pretty crucial, and the extent to which you can succeed as a working programmer is the extent to which you can see the application of those abstract concepts in your daily work. The good news is, that gets much easier with real world experience. You'll go back, reopen the books and say, "oh, it's just a stack. fine."
The exception to all of this is State Machines. They are the most important thing. If you see something in your code that smells like a state machine, for the sake of humanity, please, make it one explicitly.
About 12 months in, you (hopefully) realise that those concepts are actually pretty crucial, and the extent to which you can succeed as a working programmer is the extent to which you can see the application of those abstract concepts in your daily work. The good news is, that gets much easier with real world experience. You'll go back, reopen the books and say, "oh, it's just a stack. fine."
The exception to all of this is State Machines. They are the most important thing. If you see something in your code that smells like a state machine, for the sake of humanity, please, make it one explicitly.