I usually start with a small project, sometimes something I've implemented before. The first thing I do is start from a Hello World example, and then expand th

I usually start with a small project, sometimes something I've implemented before. The first thing I do is start from a Hello World example, and then expand that with features to get to the program I want. I do these features from examples, and I manually type the examples over. This way I get my fingers and eyes used to the syntax quickly. Once this abomination of a program that consists of bad structure and examples from the web is done, I track down some proper examples of complete programs to see how things should be done and investigate the differences between that and the approach I've picked up so far.