Can't learn from books

I'm exactly with you on how I learn best. I buy books as reference manuals, not for learning. I have found a mixture of online tutorials (which can be easily found via Google for most topics), subscriptions to educational sites, like TeamTreehouse.com, Lynda.com, etc., and Youtube tutorials helps me out best. I have restricted myself to only buying books that can be reused years down the road, like books on best practices, and the O'Reilly Cookbooks. I have also found iTunesU to be helpful in limited fashion for some topics.

Im in the same boat, check out Learnstreet.com for a good way to learn some more Javascript or Codeschool, I find it best to utilize all the stuff online and get one or two good books and try and do the exercises in them. I feel thou there are some things I need to learn from an actual person, like a mentor.

I think a mixture is good. I've recently been thinking a bit about this because I've been on a self-education kick. So far I've learned no where near as much about Javascript from any learning platform as I have from books. But.....this could be because I was looking for rich/heavy client material and HTML5 games etc.. and Javascript is often used for lighter work in conjuction with a heavier back-end like PHP, Ruby or Python. No matter how many platforms I go through, the Javascript I learn is the same very small subset of use cases. A book quite often covers much more of the language/use cases.

I'm yet to find a PHP course worth much. I'm either finding the material far too basic (eg. CodeAcademy), or just poorly delivered like many of the courses on Udemy. Treehouse has a PHP track and I'm doing that now, but I'm not confident it's going to cover much more than the other courses I've done.

HTML/CSS. I actually find a reasonable amount of value in courses - both lecture style like Udemy and the more interactive approaches of CodeAcademy and Treehouse. The reason for this is that both are relatively simple conceptually, but to use them effectively often requires a certain way of looking at the problem. Books tend to be a little too reference-y, whereas lectures and interactive classes expose approaches a little better.

In the end, I'm coming to the conclusion that these platforms are great for starting things off. They cover the basics well and the practice and repetition help solidify the fundamentals. However, I think you get to the point where you just have to branch out and books and blogs and more specific tutorials/articles are the way to progress. CodeAcademy and Treehouse seem to be good for the basics. Udacity/edX etc.. are great for more formalised university course work.

I highly recommend tracking down various bloggers to subscribe to. They provide advice and information rarely found in these types of courses and not always easy to find in books. The advice is usually based on real use cases and the blogger is often someone currently using the technology professionally.