I started teaching myself HTML and CSS (and shortly after PHP) in high school, maybe around 2003 or so. At the time I had a computer in my room, but was not allowed to have internet access on it (a wise decision by my parents that I want to implement for my own children to the extent possible these days).
My method of learning was to save web pages to a USB flash drive on an internet-connected computer, and study them, or copy them, or modify them on my computer until I understood and was able to create my own documents. Learning PHP was a similar exercise, augmented by a downloaded copy of PHP's documentation manual.
Stackoverflow definitely made answering questions much quicker, but I also think that it made it so easy to quickly get things working that I lost the practice of having to understand and fix things through deep study.
My method of learning was to save web pages to a USB flash drive on an internet-connected computer, and study them, or copy them, or modify them on my computer until I understood and was able to create my own documents. Learning PHP was a similar exercise, augmented by a downloaded copy of PHP's documentation manual.
Stackoverflow definitely made answering questions much quicker, but I also think that it made it so easy to quickly get things working that I lost the practice of having to understand and fix things through deep study.