New boss - "Have you heard of Perl?"
Me - "Um, yeah, it's a programming language with c-like structs, right?"
New boss - "Close enough, this is the project I want you to create in Perl?"

The rest of the conversation went on to involve me agreeing to write a diskcop utility that monitored space usage across several machines, had an interface for administration and a DBI backend to allow fine-tuning of allowed usage on a user level.

So I guess you can say that I started by doing. I picked up the camel book and kept a window open to the man pages. I recommend this for anyone trying to learn a new language. Have a goal or application in mind that you can use to teach yourself. Take an old aplication and figure out how you would rewrite it in the new language. Not just a line by line conversion, but how would you take into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of the new language and change the implementation accordingly.

I also really recommend reading the plethora of good code that is here, especially the tutorials. They can be invaluable.

Finally, when all else fails, and you have coded and it doesn't work and you're stumped. Ask us. We reward well for effort, and you might even teach one or two of us something new by forcing us to research a better answer or method of doing it.

C-.