i'm a self taught programmer and it's not all that great, maybe would have been if i would have devoted my entire teens and youth to learning but i had a life like regular kids so learning was slow
i still learned enough to drop out of high school and get a job at 18 though
but one thing i noticed later on when i could afford books like programming perl, beginning c and k&r, was that i learned things about these languages that i hadn't understood before, i had been programming without fully understanding the languages
this is why i recommend a good book over doing it yourself