I'm working on building some LED lighting for my aquarium, the wiring and such is not a problem.
what is a problem is a controller.

There are 2 available that I'm aware of and can find, the Bluefish controller, and the Storm X controller.
both are nice, but I wanted something with a larger screen and more control.

There are a few people making aquarium controllers that include some level of lighting control.

The Storm X is an arduino based controller but I'd like a 3.2 TFT screen.....
JArduino Aquarium controller has about the nicest interface for lighting control but that version is currently unavailable and has been in development for over 2 years with no release date in sight.

what I want to do is use my arduino mega and 3.2 tft to basically mimic the Jarduino interface with the features available in the Storm X/Bluefish controllers.

I've been looking at some examples and long story short I know very little about programming and nothing at all about C++ or whatever language arduino is.

I just don't even know where or how I would start?!

This is exactly what I want it to look like, just laid out a little differently.

 

Q: would you want to support a touch screen?

As part of getting your feet wet, look here: https://earthlcd.com/product-category/ezlcd-intelligent-lcds/

it's not the only game in town though.

 

I've already got an Arduino Mega 2560 and an ITDB02 TFT LCD MEGA Shield which is basically the TFT and shield built into one.
I got them for another project but I've never been able to do anything with them and I'd like to actually use them

 

The answer to your question is:

One step at a time. You start with something simple and by a process of stepwise refinement you make continual progress towards your goal. Sometimes you end up going down a blind alley or two, and you have to throw parts of it away and redo them. I started with a simple controller for a CD player and by the time I was done I had written 35,000 lines of C code that ran on an ATmega 2560 and didn't even use half of the available flash memory. It took four years and was one helluva piece of code if I do say so myself.

 

Arduino uses a subset of C for programming so you would need to study that first.
C is a rather cryptic computer language to learn (I never got beyond Basic myself) and it will take some serious study on your part to get familiar enough with it to program the Arduino (I'm puzzled as to why you would buy one without knowing anything about C ).
I suggest you study the tutorials for that on the Arduino website and also, perhaps some tutorials on the basics of C, such as something here.
Other than that, all I can say is "Good luck".