I had the exact same desire about a year ago; I was bored with web development and wanted to learn a new discipline (I never went through with my plans though,

I had the exact same desire about a year ago; I was bored with web development and wanted to learn a new discipline (I never went through with my plans though, so I have no real advice for you). My planned route was to get a formal education at the university. I'm sure there are self-taught bioinformaticians out there, but my perception of the field was that it would be very useful to take at-least a few courses to get into it.