Meetings I highly Recommend You to Attend
Even though learning through on-line resources is convenient and easily accessible, I strongly recommend you to attend local user group meetings and SQL Saturday events.
My personal experience is on-line search and learning provide me with detailed answer to your “how to” questions. After some time, I lost momentum to learn more and improve further. Then, those in-person trainings and interactions really open another world to me because these meetings not only bring more knowledge to me but also bring to my life a group of people who are more passionate about learning than me. So, attending these meetings is my secret to keep learning.
Here is list of meetings that I have enjoyed:
http://sqlsaturday.com/ Search this website and find out the meeting information close to you. These whole day meetings, filled with informative and inspirational sessions, are free. Because the topics are all so good, I have gone to near by cities in order to have more than one meeting per year. I have been meetings in Spartanburg/Greenville SC, Chattanooga TN, and Charlotte NC.
http://ssig.pass.org/ This is the user group meeting at Greenville SC. They meet in the evening of 2nd Tuesday of every month at the Greeville Campus of ECPI (1001 Keys Dr, Greenville, SC 29615) . Even though their webpage is not updated, the meeting and presentation quality is very good.
http://charbigroup.com/ http://charlotte-sql.org/ These are two user group meetings at Charlotte, NC area.
There are a lot of other user groups that have similar meeting regularly, just search SQL Server User Group with your area name, you will find out when and where your local user group meets. Even if you are unable to attend meetings in person, you could still find out virtual meetings at http://www.pass.org/. I believe in attending meetings and connecting with other learners.