Patience is the most important thing to have. I take a lot of notes on how things are done and why they work. The learning never stops.
I also took my system and installed all the free software packages on my windows box to make it into a development web server. ( a place to learn and test things out before I transfer to the "Live" website. )
ActivePerl
Apache
GD
ImageMagick
mySQL
PHP
ZendOptimizer
I never liked the All-in-one installers for web server setup.
I never could learn things if it was a pre-installed package with no "hands on" experience.
Start a project. It does not have to be something complex. When done, take on another project, ect..
Soon you will no longer see 1's and 0's, but the blonds and red heads.
~ The Matrix