I recently started learning Ruby in the beginning of the Summer by reading Why's Poignant Guide. After Why's poignant guide, I purchased and worked my way through Foundation of Rails 2 and created a simple Rails app up on Heroku. Now I'm reading meta programming of Ruby until Agile Web Development with Rails fourth edition is released.<p>I'm just curious how everyone learned to program, because my college's professors are simply abysmal when it comes to mentoring. I've found out that a majority of my professors haven't created anything in ages, and their skills are outdated.
I find writing something I want to use the best way to go about it. I wrote a few things, private pastie, bookmarking app, blog, remote log viewer. Just write something you need and keep building on it.
By creating web sites. Is there any other way? You won't know what you've learned by reading unless you try and apply it in any case. Your professors are possibly more CS guys in any case.