Some resources: peepcode.com (not free) youtube or itunes videos of cs classes, e.g. Stanford's CS106X For me what's worked best has been to read a book or two

Some resources: peepcode.com (not free) youtube or itunes videos of cs classes, e.g. Stanford's CS106X For me what's worked best has been to read a book or two on a language and immediately start using the language on a problem I hope to solve. This works really well for languages like Ruby, Python, JavaScript, where there's lots of additional online help available on blog posts, stackoverflow etc. The online help is great when you get stuck on a bug or on a part of the language you didn't read about. I would suggest building to learn. Find a pain in your life and build a solution for it. It doesn't have to be a big pain; it could be something trivial but you should have some sort of vested interest in a successful completion. Good luck.