I am a self taught developer. I learned Javascript, jQuery, PHP (basics + Laravel), RubyOnRails (basics ) using online video tutorials and blogs.
Google, YouTube, StackOverflow are my lifelines.
I don't know how struggle works without google ? I cannot seat idle and look at my code, then refer some PDF docs for a reference, and make thousand of attempt to fix that issue.
Instead I'll go through StackOverflow, Github issues or some blog post to fix that. This process can take 2 mins to several hours and in the process I may learn few more things which I was neglecting. These things have improved my coding.
I wonder if you don't google, how'll you find Node, Python, Ruby plugins. Should we have an encyclopedia for that or will it be wise to build that thing from scratch ?