What are your effective ways of learning how to program?

I prefer just doing a project and figuring out stuff as I go. Of course, a basic programming course on data types, data structures, their characteristics, basic algorithms, Boolean logic and stuff is also useful.

@Fast-Nop this, the reason I became a well versed programmer at a young age was because I took an idea and tried to materialize it no matter what.

You will learn 10x more stuff trying to create a small chat app that you would do in, let's say, a standard networks class.

@JKyll I even have this as seasoned dev. Actually, I just wanted to get my hands on Cortex-M and decided to implement a project. That has gone totally out of hands and has become an ongoing endeavour. ^^

You only learn programming while programming

Make mistakes. Lots of them.

Figure out what you want to make. Than try to do it, stackoverflow.com will be a huge help. Just remember "perfection is the biggest hinderer of progress", you can't fix/find every single bug.