Years ago I discovered Perl and I was fascinated enough to decide I had to learn it. So I printed all the manual pages and started reading them. The problem was that I did not own any computer at this time. So my method of learning was purely theoretical: it only consisted in reading books.

I can tell you this method did not work. After a few months, I forgot most of what I thought I learnt. Later I also had to learn stupid things such as MS languages and other proprietary stuff. All very boring and tedious work/studies activities that distracted me away from interesting programming languages.

It's only years later, quite recently actually, when I had my own computer with a free and open source operating system, and also when I had lots of free time and an internet connection, that I could "re-discover" perl and really start to learn it.

Only then I could seriously start to learn it (and I still have much to learn). The difference was that I then had personal computing projects, stuff I could test my knowledge on.

So I think that to learn a programming language, you must find a balance between theory and practice. Reading documentation is as important as doing some actual coding, preferably on a project you feel passionate about (it's better for motivation).

I don't think I could tell anything else about this subject. I hope it'll be useful.