> Half an hour with a good teacher can save you weeks of table head-butting. I spent a year and change trying to teach myself calculus from a textbook. Eventua

> Half an hour with a good teacher can save you weeks of table head-butting. I spent a year and change trying to teach myself calculus from a textbook. Eventually I signed up for a class at a community college and learned more in a month than I had all year. I think this says more about my learning style than anything else, though, but my experience was shared (on other topics) with lots of other people. I think you benefit a lot from having other people working on the same thing, and you benefit a lot from having a teacher/mentor who can interactively explain to you where you are going wrong. You can definitely find some hard-ass who taught themselves measure theory in a cave, but...