Well, I am self-taught. Actually, I am still learning, I just started a year back. And IMO, project-based learning has been really beneficial in my case. In school, I always grew up knowing I am a bad student, I don't learn anything because I am too stupid to learn. Now, after my attempt at learning to program, I understand that it is not my inability to learn but more my inability to enjoy learning just for the sake of knowledge. When I learn something I need to know where I need it, where it fits into the bigger problem. And this is where a project-based learning has been helpful, what I know about topics like formal grammars, parsing, concurrency, distributed consensus, which data structure to use for a particular use case, basics of cryptography, sockets and protocols etc. is mostly because I took up projects that I found interesting and these projects needed me to have an idea about these things. And this is also project-based learnings biggest disadvantage. Whatever I learn, I learn from googling and reading the top few links. This leaves with serious gaps in my knowledge until I come across another article or resource that explains the gap or someone in some forum points it out to me. Learning in a formal setting is pre-emptive, but this also means there is an authoritative figure who gives you a structure that you follow to gain a thorough understanding of the topic. So I guess rather than saying one is superior to the other, attempts should be made to mix and match the good things from both styles.