Glad to help. I know what you mean about learnning from a book. I'd been programming for 9 years before I communicated in any way, shape, or form with another programmer (wasn't on line back then). The learning was slow, but I did learn to dig in and experiment, and it's really helped me in learning other languages since.
The problem I see when I take courses today is that so many of the people want the instructor to lead them by the nose, step by step, through everything. At that rate it'd take you ten years to become even moderately successful in any language. You've got to experiment, try this and that, and only ask help after you've run up against the wall a half -dozen or so times on a problem. As a general rule, if I have a problem that takes me 2-3 days to figure out, I'll learn 3 or 4 new things totally unrelated to the problem I started out researching. "It's got to be the going,
not the getting there that's good!"
-Harry Chapin