I agree, Stack overflow is a life saver. However, for the purpose of purely learning a language or programming in general, I feel that hitting that brick wall, reading up a lot of books, and manually building that hammer to smash through it by yourself is an invaluable learning experience :)

I completely agree with you. I just think that the exercises in books to help you learn programming are usually (if you get a high quality book :P) better than the ones on free websites. However, this is just my opinion formed from my own experiences with both media.

That said, I think online resources do have their place in learning. Take the Euler project for example. I cannot recommend it highly enough for exercising your brain in the right way. Also, online resources do help people, usually noobies, to stay interested if they don't have the dedication yet.

Call me old fashioned, but I still believe that just getting a book, sitting down, and getting to work is one of the best ways to learn a new language... It's worked for me in the past many times.