As far as UI goes, spend a lot of time on design sites such as dribbble and try to identify patterns and discover the purpose of them on your own. UI design becomes more engrained when you discover trends (and their purposes) rather than simply reading about them imo.
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Here's my UX bookmarks dump for reads/blogs to get started:
http://52weeksofux.com/tagged/week_1 http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/ http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/ http://www.alistapart.com/articles/
As far as UI goes, spend a lot of time on design sites such as dribbble and try to identify patterns and discover the purpose of them on your own. UI design becomes more engrained when you discover trends (and their purposes) rather than simply reading about them imo.