Another reason why reading a tutorial or two (or better, five) is essential as the first step. Just jumping to coding programming exercises won't help much in learning how to write idiomatic code for the language.
I'm not suggesting that coding up solutions to PE problems should be done instead of reading tutorials. I mean how are you going to write code if you have no idea how the language works. However I personally find that I learn very little from simply reading a book about a language, I have to write code in it at the same time to help internalize the concepts I'm reading about. And for that I find PE to be a good first step after hello world.
