(I’m looking for user feedback here, so please leave a comment.)

Whenever a friend of mine is looking to learn PHP, I find that they always ask the same question. What book should I get to learn? I always reply with pretty much the same thing. Book? Why do you need a book? Use the Internet.

Basically, I’m writing this post to get the opinions of others. Do you find it helpful to learn with an object in front of you (a book) or can you learn by referencing other websites?

I find that having a book actually seems to slow my process of learning. I learned all of the web languages/markups/etc using only the Internet, and I did fine with that.

I tried to learn some C a little while back. I couldn’t really find the same resources on the web that were there for PHP, HTML, CSS, etc. I decided to get a book instead. That didn’t really work. I got two books, and I just couldn’t learn using the book. I could probably force myself to get into it, but that’s not natural.

In my opinion, the best way to learn is by application. While I was learning PHP, I basically taught myself. I used a few simple tutorials to get started, and then I applied what I knew to accomplish what I really wanted to do. For some reason, I couldn’t really find the freedom that I wanted while using a book on C. This could have happened because C is drastically different from PHP, but I’m not really sure.

How do you learn? Does having a book in front of you help or hurt? I would love to hear stories. :)