I'm still learning how to programme (getting better every year); Stack Overflow is good for quickly discovering class functions I didn't know about (but would h

I'm still learning how to programme (getting better every year); Stack Overflow is good for quickly discovering class functions I didn't know about (but would have found by drawing my finger down the class reference if I'd gone that way), and suggestions for dealing with annoying bugs or compilation failures. It all has to be carefully filtered, though; I know I really should double-check everything I read there against a more authoritative source, and examine any algorithms etc for applicability. But that's not learning programming. That's an occasional source for a neat trick, or a function I didn't know about. I probably try SO a couple of times a week, and generally it's not to learn anything so much as to save myself five minutes digging through a reference manual. For proper learning I just sit down and grind through a book while reimplementing The Secret of Monkey Island in whatever language/style I'm trying to learn. So for at least some of us, self-learning programming before SO was pretty much the same as now.