I learned writing compliant HTML and CSS by reading the specifications "from cover to cover" (or rather the online equivalent of that) in 2001 or so. A few year

I learned writing compliant HTML and CSS by reading the specifications "from cover to cover" (or rather the online equivalent of that) in 2001 or so. A few years later I learned PHP and MySQL from reading the documentation on their official websites. (Well, reading and trying it out on my own purposeless projects.) Never saw W3Schools until 2010 when a co-worker (web developer) showed it to me.