[dpweb]

I wouldn't neglect the theory. Bad habits picked up can take years to break.

Find the best book ever written for your language of choice, its Crockford's book for js I imagine - don't know about other languages.

I would NOT learn to write code from random web resources. A good portion of the code on sites is horrible. There's alot of horrific PHP code floating around out there.

Except, find someone on Github who is blowing your mind with their stuff and read through their gists and projects. Succinct and easy to understand code is best. I did this for two hours last night and got more out of it than a month reading weak stuff and the more mediocre books..

[harvestmoon]

I learned to do some MySQL from a random website. Code wasn't great. I didn't learn in detail, either. And it used mysql_query(). Ideally, a book from the last year or so would have been better!