The best approaches I've found are: http://www.codeschool.com/ http://www.codeschool.com/ and http://eloquentjavascript.net/ http://eloquentjavascript.net/

The best approaches I've found are: http://www.codeschool.com/ http://www.codeschool.com/ and http://eloquentjavascript.net/ http://eloquentjavascript.net/ But I do think it's crucial to have some little project that's actually live and launched, that people are using, that you can add things to and constantly improve. It helps you get immediate feedback, and remember why you're doing what you're doing: to make other people's lives better! You don't want to just be learning in a vaccuum for months or years, not being of benefit to anyone except some maybe-future-self years from now. Even if you start with some plain HTML site, and add nothing but a dumb "The time is now " + Time.now() -- then at least you've started, and you can improve from there. As you go through Code School, or Eloquent JavaScript, or whatever other ways you learn, try to find a way to apply what you've learned to your site. And lastly: learning by NECESSITY is the most effective way. If you HAVE to figure out how to make your site do some kind of function because you have people complaining to you that it's not, then you'll go figure out how to do it, and remember it with an intensity that you just don't get from, "OK, now it's time for Chapter 7."