Personally, I spent a lot of money on books. I had lots of them. Dennis Ritchie's C book. Charles Petzold's Windows books, several QuickBasic books (yep, that's a long time ago), books on Assembler, books on Java, books on Pascal, "Learn X Programming in 21 Days"... shoot, I joined Columbia House Book Club just to get these books at a cheaper price! Never read them from cover to cover. Did exactly what I do now with Google. Looked for the info I wanted, read about it, implemented it. Lots of trial and error and taking those examples and modifying them to do what I wanted. Now that the internet is a plethora of information, all my books got donated to my local used book store. My book shelves are nearly empty.