My style is different, of course. :) I tend to learn new things by reading, or at least skimming, the best book I can find, first. I like having an overall pers

My style is different, of course. :) I tend to learn new things by reading, or at least skimming, the best book I can find, first. I like having an overall perspective on the scene before getting into the weeds. For Scheme, I read SICP, of course. For Java and C++, Bruce Eckel. For Ruby, _Why followed by the Pickaxe. For Emacs, I read Learning Emacs, a very good book. I even learned Perl from a book, although not the Camel book, which is torture to read -- I used Randal Schwartz's Learning Perl, which was very good. I learned CSS by reading Eric Meyer's O'Reilly book, pretty much cover to cover, as well as Dan Cederholm's book. I learned SQL (and Tcl as well) from Greenspun's books (e.g. SQL for Web Nerds) which weren't really dedicated and pedantic SQL tutorials but were, in a way, much more useful. Of course, I'm the guy who got bored with BASIC as a kid and decided to teach himself Pascal. So I read a few books on Pascal. Unfortunately, we didn't own a computer at the time, and the library didn't have a Pascal compiler, so I didn't get to compile a Pascal program until two years later. So maybe I just got into that habit early and never really lost it. Of course, you can't actually learn a language from a book. You have to practice a lot to get the syntax and the semantics and the idioms into your fingers. So it's just a question of whether you do the reading first, or second. There are quite a few exceptions to my usual rule. I know a bunch of C, but I never read a really good C programming book. Of course, that means I get to look forward to K&R, which is nice. :) I probably learned as much Perl from randomly hacking as I did from Learning Perl. I still haven't gotten far through Mastering Regular Expressions, though I've used them for years. I have yet to find a really great book on PHP (to everyone's astonishment, I'm sure) -- the O'Reilly book is okay, but I keep getting bored. And for some reason I cannot make myself read any docs for jQuery. It's so sensible that I can't concentrate on the docs; it feels like a language that I already know! Technology is changing things. I normally hate learning from lectures -- talking is just too slow, and you can't skim it -- so I was surprised to discover that podcasts and screencasts about programming are actually quite useful. There are aspects to being a good programmer that are best learned by watching over someone's shoulder, or listening to them ramble on about their most-favored and least-favored tools. And then, you know, there are blogs and news.yc.