Question about learning software?

I have in interest in learning software and pretty much everything about photopshop, setting up and maintaining a website, software development, 3d modelilng, etc. Is the best thing that I can do to learn and get experience since I have a lot of free time at home, to just check books out at the library and try to extract as much information as I can from that. I know that some have tutorials. But other than college, how do you learn.

First I would say focus on one or two main softwares you would like to learn.. to many at the same time might cramp your brain ;-)

The best way to learn a software, for instance photoshop, is to have one installed on your laptop or pc for you to practice on. Online tutorials are good enough. I learned photoshop through online tutorials and practicing a lot. Spending lots of time doing different tutorials from the net as well as experimenting on my own.

For other softwares, like web programming (through dreamweaver, .NET, Java, etc)... it's the same... you gotta have one installed on your laptop or pc for you to have a playground to practice a lot.

I hope that helps.

Get the programs and play with them. I taught myself photoshop and Dreamweaver and can pretty much create basic websites. Since Dreamweaver is owned by macromedia flash, or adobe now, you get a few flash tricks and templates build into dreamweaver. Photoshop tutorials are great too.

Get the software, have a book in hand, but, in my case, I got the best results by opening up the software and taking it for frequent test drives. Don't be afraid to go in there and try stuff! Getcher self some play files. For example, with Photoshop, fetch a few photos you can really mangle and not regret it (like, make copies of some precious photos and mangle those copies!) With Word, the same: go create a document, and *try* to create a dotted outline, and *try* to diddle the margins.

I also found one heckuva book or two at OReilly - the Personal Trainer series. Takes you keystroke by keystroke through a piece of software. The book on Word, I paced through, in about two weeks, and learned so many tricks, I was utterly amazed.

Now, that there Photoshop, is so darned complex, it might well be worth a formal course at a community college! But a very good book for it is "The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers" by Scott Kelby - a very friendly sort of fellow and book.