Dave 'Fargo' Kosak: I graduated college in 1996. The web was just about to explode, commercially, but of course only the most forward-thinking colleges were ready for it. So most of what I learned is self-taught. Again, I'm a writer, and while there are a lot of courses you can take to learn the craft, ask anyone and they'll tell you the real answer to being a better writer is to write all the time.
I think that's good advice for anyone looking to bust into the web industry, no matter what you do. The web is a very cool place to work because ANYONE can publish their own website. So -- do it! If you want to be an artist post a website using your art. If you want to write, write a website. If you want to code, code a website. Code as many as you can. Build up a portfolio that shows how talented you are.
Someone will snap you up quickly!
Frans P. de Vries: I have a formal education and nine years of working experience in system administration and programming at my old job, which I found to be an excellent basis for running Internet sites (at 3D Gamers we own and maintain our two servers ourselves, and I do some admin work on the Blue's News server as well). Anything I picked up since then is self-taught though.
Adam 'Barak' Perfect: It was pretty much all self-taught. When Tribes 1 came out I was bored one day and decided to try and learn HTML to create a web site for my tribe, LTS. After a few pretty useless designs I got reasonably good and from there I just picked stuff up along the way. The same thing happened with PHP, though this time I bought a book to help me. Other than that, I've found the best way to learn is through practice.
Anthony 'Rayn' Maio: 100% self taught. Much to my dismay, there are no web orientated courses offered at my school. I got some books and learned the rest hands on. It is much easier to learn new material when it truly interests you, as web design does.
Brian Clair: Except for my writing ability (which I took several courses at college to hone and develop), everything else was self-taught.
John 'Rizzuh' Jensen: Self taught.
Louis Wu: When I started designing websites, there WEREN'T any formal courses to take - the web was less than a year old at the time. (I remember how liberating Netscape 2.0 felt... finally being able to do stuff like color table cells!
)
I actually TAUGHT a series of web design short courses in 1996 - basic skills for local IT folks (companies like Intel, Fuji, LaCie) in the area I lived in then (Portland, Oregon).
Rob 'Keltic' Shea: I had some basic programming classes in high school and college, but I’ve never taken any high level formal training, it’s all self taught. Some of my greatest enjoyment comes from learning new things. That’s what is great about web development. It’s constantly evolving. There is always something new to learn.
Tyler 'TySoft' Lott: It was all self-taught for me. I did a lot of observing of others who were in this type of occupation before I really got involved, so hrm, I guess you could call that semi-self-taught.
Joscha 'fraGGle' Dzielak: I worked for a big company (job.de) and had a clanmate (hey... wait a tick... every company I worked for has clanmates of me...) who gave me a very short introduction in php. It was not even enough to do print a "Hello World!" on a webpage so I had to buy some books and taught php and mysql by myself.
Matt 'Acrappa' Martinez: No courses, I just used a HTML guide I had printed and viewed lots of website sources.
Ben 'Hypn0tik' Tamler: As stated previously, everything was self taught. This has become a hobby of mine....so the need to teach myself becomes greater by the day.
Manveer 'Eidolon' Heir: No formal courses, besides English throughout school... all you need to know is how to form coherent sentences together to do this job.
Final Thoughts:
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