I was reading an article the other day which included the following useful snippet of advice for learning new programming languages:
"Learn a programming language quickly by modifying other code. I found code for searching a database. I just modified that and fed in this database. As long as you know the basic tools: if, then, loops, recursion, the syntax of the language, functions, etc. you can learn any programming language by having a book for the basic syntax and modifying other code."
