Poll: How do you learn new technologies?

Would like to understand what are the best practices employed by this community to learn/keep up with new technologies.

Feel free to leave comments if you dont see a option or would like to elaborate on your response.

Building is key, but the way I learn while I'm building is to go through blog posts, tutorials and videos. Always free ones though.

Most of my learning is from "print".

I always start with the available documentation, coupled with code reading to help me understand certain aspects better. Once I have a good feel for the language, I buy books to help me understand the nuances I may have missed initially. I usually end up buying books on languages and systems I expect to use a lot. I used oreilly's safari for years, but eventually stopped because I discovered that its available changed my learning style: I browsed more and read less deeply that usual.

No videos but I do use blogs occasionally.

Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/) is great for this kind of thing.

The problems start simple, which is perfect for the "learn the syntax" / "learn the tools" phase.

Then the problems get harder, which is perfect for the "learn the advanced features" / "learn about the community" phase.

For me, it's orders of magnitude more efficient to try out a new technology than to read a book. For example, I recently took on a more advanced Arduino project. Knowing very little about electrical engineering, I've been making slow tangible progress, but immense intellectual progress.

I usually end up seeking out reference material to supplement my experimentation, but by far most of my learning comes from actually "building something using the technology".