I learnt DM, Iconing, Mapping, and even a bit of music creation all by myself. It's a hard process, but it ends up giving you a better understanding than reading bunch of complicated tutorials.

I remember reading the Blue Book, many of the BYONDScape tutorials, and even BYOND Developer tutorials over and over and over and almost never picking anything up until I used my own knowledge and the list of BYOND commands in the Help tab in DM to learn how to do everything.

Good luck, it's a long and bumpy road, but you've taken the right path.