I found that basically all the resources I need to learn any language are now on the internet for free. Books, at least for learning the basics and intermediate skills for a programming are not completely necessary (though I'd bet there are still some that prefer using books).

I agree with Solarise that it's about experimentation, but I don't believe that the experiment has to be as esoteric as writing a script that counts file directory lines. What do you actually want to do? Just give it a shot. The first thing I ever created in PHP was blog software. I had no clue what I was doing, but I figured it out because I wanted it bad enough. I had no intention of selling or sharing it (there was no way I was ready for that), but I just wanted to build myself something useful.

I recommend that as the fastest way to learn a programming language.