[AnimalMuppet]

I mainly learn from books. I learned C from K&R; I learned C++ from Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language; I learned Perl from the Camel book. (I don't remember how I learned Java. It may have been online, or it may have been from a book.)

A mentor is useful, because after reading a book like K&R, you know how to write syntactically-correct lines of C, lines that actually do what you think they do, but you don't know how to program in C. You can write lines of C, but you don't know how to write pages of C without making a mess of it. That's where a mentor helps - that next level past syntax.