Those last bunch of posts were really unreadable...

One of my clients offered to pay for an on-line class on .Net 3 years ago for me. I had only done VB6 up to that point and only for a couple of years...

I took the class - 50% of it was useless as I would have expected.

40% of it was good information - but I could have gotten it in help files when I needed to get it anyway.

10% of it was net-new information that helped me jump into .Net more quickly.

But back to the original question - I started coding prior to 1980 and all on my own. I was lucky my HS has main-frame type computers that the students could program against.