ok so I was thinking. WOW teaching yourself is hard. so I was wondering how many of u guys also taught yourself.
Best way to learn things, trying them out for yourself. They say experience is a dear school and that fools will learn from no other… but you get what you pay for.
Cas 
heckboy, Iv noticed you have taken an interest in LWJGL.
I personally learnt alot from the NEHE tutorials. I know alot of people say that there messy and such.
But there extremely good for learners. At the bottom of every page is a link to a LWJGL version.
there are a few mistakes in some lessons, like 27 but by the time you get to it, you will notice whats wrong and can post for a working version on the forums.
I have tried the NEHE b4. I have always look at the java version. maybe teh two are different. I will look into it.
one of the nicest pieces of code to quickly get started with LWJGL is the space invaders example that comes with lwjgl, very quick to look at and understand how to do the basic stuff.
Pretty much taught myself. I started out at home computers with basic and assembler. Took me awhile to get this OO philosophy later. Actually it really clicked when I started learning UML at university.
I found the LWJGL section (finally) caue I was looking everywhere for a good tutorial.
whawt is UML?
I also learned basic. then I leraned C++(very basic. didnt even to OO yet)
I cant even imagine going back to nonOOP. No orginazation. YUK!
I also learned a lot of wikipedia 
Im guessing UML is unified modeling language?
Though when most people say “UML” they really mean the extremely slimmed down subset of the whole thing that people tend to use to flesh out class hierarchies before they code them. I don’t know too many coders that are actually familiar with the whole specification, or even very many that are strict with their use of the parts that they do know…
WOW it is suprising how many people taught themselves. i thought most pplw ould have had a teacher.
Yep. I basically use Class Diagrams and Sequence Diagrams. At work I also use Use Case Diagrams and Component Diagrams. Sometimes I also use Activity Diagrams (sort of) when designing workflows with customers. Most colleagues and friends do the same.
I had some teaching at school, but that was almost laughable. I had Pascal in upper school but the teacher had no real idea and just liked to fiddle around with computers. I later had some assembler an C in university since I studied Electrical Engineering, but that was pretty basic and in scope of controlling traffic lights 
You will find, that even the ones, who say they had a teacher aquired their real skills when teaching themself. And a lesson you’ll learn when working in the IT business is, that you’ll never stop learning, til you retire…
[quote]til you retire…
[/quote]
hopefully youwill learn afterwards asswell. laptop in the deathbed baby.
;D
Learning for yourself is good and really also helps to learn stuff on your own.
Sounds redundant but I mean it in such a way that you need not have someone always pointing stuff out for you.
While often stuff in Java is not easy to figure out (sometimes you wonder if the people designing APIs ever have to use them themselves) you really need to learn how to actually do it.
OpenSource Java stuff can be the worst stuff to learn.
But even then it still helps to have a mentor to help & guide you and give you the one tip or another.
Looking back the topics might seem ridiculously obvious but for beginners, they are everything but.
@Nehe:
I also learned my OpenGL from his tutorials and they were very good. Plus having the Red Book and some other resources were invaluable.
I haven’t seen a competent programming teacher as of yet.
They tend to be completely stuck in their own ways, and their last commercial coding project was probably more than 10 years ago, if one at all. Coding theory takes over, focusing on abstractions, yet failing to write a few non-trival lines of working code without a compiler.
Anyway, that’s been my experience on my study.
I started programming on my graphing calculator in 6th grade, and it went from there. Basically I just looked at the source of a game I had and figured it out. I’ve learned some important things from professors/teachers, but my actual knowledge of how to program is self-taught.
Err, yeah, I guess that’s also true for me, but I still clicked self-taught because I might as well never have taken the class for all the difference it made.
Stuff tends to go in one ear and out the other until you need to get something done because you want to, and you dig around to figure out how to achieve it within a language, and that’s the point where you finally “get” it.
In some cases, one intense day working on a personal project can worth more than an entire semester of programming class as far as understanding goes.
The exceptions would probably be classes like data structures and algos (yeesh), which are to some extent more math than programming, and which may be best handled in a school setting because they require more analysis than futzing around getting things to work. I still wish I had been CS in school (or at least dipped in a bit more) because I would have liked to go in detail through a lot of that material with a teacher.