From someone that is 100% self-taught I can say from experience that its more an issue of "you don't know what you don't know. This is the major crux of self-learning. How can google possibly help you if you don't know how to frame the problem or even what terms are involved in whatever it is you want to learn? One example I remember was learning about database optimization; how do I know to search for "normalization" if I don't know what normalization is? So of course getting answers from google is super-fast, but that entails that you know what to search for.
My first experience with "coding" was trying to make a website for my tshirt printing business. I spent literally 12 hours a day for 10 days learning css and html and I loved it. So I coded about 10 pages for my website. Naturally I just copied and pasted the layout and menus and common stuff over and over throughout all pages. Finally on the 11th day, through a random search for something I don't remember, I stumbled upon this concept of "include_once" where you could create your website in this "templated" style. You just put "include_once(header)" and then includ_once(footer) and you didn't need to constantly duplicate everything. But it was in some language called php so that entailed that i start googling "php" ...
So you see, a 5 minute talk with a guy that knew about coding websites could have quickly briefed me about the differences between client-side and server-side languages, and why and how to use them. Could have told me to start with a framework like kohana rather than write spahgetti-rific code for the first 3 years of my coding hobby. Could have told me about using things like jquery for quick js development (and why and how js is appropriate). Yes yes, expert "crash courses" are definitely valuable.
Note: I tend to disagree with the term "self-taught". Plenty of people have taught me, it just has not been in a classroom environment. I have learned endlessly from the great teachers that write books, code open-source and take the time out to answer forum posts- so I'm not self-taught, its more like self-motivated.
I can see in your case where you are really just beginning so nearly anyone you talk to is going to have a approximately correct answer to your question but once you reach a certain point where you know the basics I'd argue that it will be much harder to answer your questions by simply asking those around you. You are also perhaps not asking Google the right questions. because I just did a search for "optimize MySQL Database" and the first heading of the first result that popped up was titled "normalize" so I stand by my claim that I prefer searching over asking by default.
but have you ever been on the other side? seems like people ask, you explain the right way, they look at you like you're speaking greek, and go back to copy + pasting...
in other words, i think timing matters. once you're bored with the copy + pasting, you'll either listen to advice, or be on the lookout for a solution while googling.
My first experience with "coding" was trying to make a website for my tshirt printing business. I spent literally 12 hours a day for 10 days learning css and html and I loved it. So I coded about 10 pages for my website. Naturally I just copied and pasted the layout and menus and common stuff over and over throughout all pages. Finally on the 11th day, through a random search for something I don't remember, I stumbled upon this concept of "include_once" where you could create your website in this "templated" style. You just put "include_once(header)" and then includ_once(footer) and you didn't need to constantly duplicate everything. But it was in some language called php so that entailed that i start googling "php" ...
So you see, a 5 minute talk with a guy that knew about coding websites could have quickly briefed me about the differences between client-side and server-side languages, and why and how to use them. Could have told me to start with a framework like kohana rather than write spahgetti-rific code for the first 3 years of my coding hobby. Could have told me about using things like jquery for quick js development (and why and how js is appropriate). Yes yes, expert "crash courses" are definitely valuable.
Note: I tend to disagree with the term "self-taught". Plenty of people have taught me, it just has not been in a classroom environment. I have learned endlessly from the great teachers that write books, code open-source and take the time out to answer forum posts- so I'm not self-taught, its more like self-motivated.