It depends on how much I already know. I normally do the Google thing too, but if it's something I'm very new to then I still think a book is your best bet. For example anything C++ or PHP related these days is usually found by Googling, but I recently had to learn XSLT and found due to the way XSLT "works", I should go with the book option. Hence, "Teach Yourself XSLT in 21 Days" on my desk has given me a nice solid grounding instead of floundering around with snippets from mailing lists and wondering why my procedural attempts at transforms didn't seem to work very well.