I find that when someone asks what is the best way to learn how to program, people usually provide them with references to a bunch texts written by various authors.

However I don't believe many people at all learn to program from books? I find that they are usually faced with a challenge and then use programming as tool to overcome it.

For example I 'got into' programming because I wanted to start a server for a game I was playing, so I googled and read through the support for that particular server and now I am a employed software engineer, using only the skills I developed (and then further developed) by coding C# scripts for a not very popular server package.

So my question is, do people generally find it easier to learn from these books? I know I have looked at a few of them and found them far too 'dry' to encourage me to finish it.