First, I get the tools installed. Then, I follow an introductory tutorial, paying particular attention to the concepts that I am least familiar with, and doing

First, I get the tools installed. Then, I follow an introductory tutorial, paying particular attention to the concepts that I am least familiar with, and doing any exercises that are part of the tutorial. I then pick an example of a problem that I know, such as parsing a log file, writing a lisp interpreter, a simple web server, maybe a problem or two from the Euler site. Picking a good tutorial can help a lot. For Python, I have both the introduction and the recipes book. Also, I try to read a lot of code from github.