I bought myself a book, think it was SAMS teach yaself in 21 days or whatever. I think most of the bokos will be fairly similar, tbh it served as a good intro but not much more. Once you have the basics I think the only real way to get into is to have a good project to work on and get stuck in.
I wanted to do some modifications to an open source php project so I learnt a lot from looking at other people's code. Each time I didnt understand something I didnt proceed until I had worked it out, it can be slow going initially but once you get your head round some of the more complex ideas it becomes kinda fun in a geeky way
!
GL!