[simonblack]

Give yourself a non-trivial project. It doesn't really matter what it is, you'll be 'building it to throw away' anyway.

Now start building it, with one hand on a good reference, and the other hand on the Google search page.

It'll be terrible code, but you'll be learning as you go. By the time you've built that program to your satisfaction, you'll have learned a lot.

So much so, that you will want to throw that first piece of crap programming away and to rewrite it properly.