Lot of good comments already. You can learn both ways. One is better though and will save you much misery. Remember, hacking and teaching are not the same discipline.

Every time you sit down to code, you are practicing. Just like with a physical task like martial arts or sports, if you practice wrongly (poor technique, no warm-ups, random effort) you might improve but it will be slow and you will hit limits of how much you can improve very quickly. Additionally, you will have ingrained things that will be harder to undo than if you'd just started correctly when you began.

I can think of no other site like this for any discipline where so many experienced, talented, patient professionals are willing to guide the uninitiated with personalized advice and tutorials that would cost thousands of dollars in the real world. Just visiting and reading here on a regular basis will save you hours if not years (and not just as a beginner; I've been using perl for 7 years now and I learn something almost every time I visit). Everyone writes bad code at first. How much bad code you end up writing is quite negotiable.