Oh pish, so untrue. I bought a book called Visual Quickguide: PHP and MySQL by Larry Ullman. The book starts with easy stuff and builds on it, and comes with sample scripts, so copying the examples in that book as I read it helped me understand how code behaves. After looking at the source code of simple programs I began to understand how constructs like loops and especially arrays were employed to solve complex problems. I use two nested arrays to quickly break down a template and insert code where the template tags are, for example.
Basically I just read for about eighty hours.