Best way(s) to teach someone else to program, person to person.
raquo: I was tought PHP that way (I only used to program in Delphi before a bit). Initially, I read the basic parts of the PHP manual (about syntax, etc), then we and my friend (a PHP master) sat for about 5 hours and wrote code that did a lot of different stuff - cycles, regexps, reading files, basic XML parsing, etc. Of course I forgot it all in the next several hours, but I later often returned to it to see how to do various stuff (we commented the code generously). Useful, especially given the lack of examples for some topics in the PHP manual. Although this is probably not the kind of teaching you meant...