I taught myself..it's pretty easy. But the best welder to learn on is either a Lincoln arc stick welder , and just get some scrap pieces of angle iron or plate and practice welds. You need to chip off the slag to see your welds thought with these. The key is to pick the right amperage and stick thickness and holding the stick at right spot and moving right speed so as not to burn thru metal but not so fast that you don't melt your metal pieces sufficiently. Nothing that a weekend of fun with scrap pieces won't teach you I bought a stick welder and a Hobart portable MIG welder which has the flux in the wire. MIG doesn't make hardly any slag, so you can see your weld much better, and since it uses a thin wire on a spool for filler metal, you can weld much thinner metal, like car sheet metal. Buy good welders. I made the mistake of thinking the imports would do the job. I bought my Lincoln 40 years ago and it still works perfect. I bought a chinese MIG welder which was a 1/3 of the price almost 10 years ago and it didn't make it 6 months before it totally stopped working and there is no listed manufacturer to find parts for it. I bough tmy Hobart MIG right after that , and 10 years of heavy shop fabrication use and hobbying around and it also runs perfect, and if it ever does break, the dealer is just a few miles away with parts Don't buy junk. And just practice. That's what you do in school anyway. You will immediately see crappy results when you start and you just adjust and you eventually get it pretty quickly. Of course it is better if you have a friend that knows how to do it and shows you because it speeds it up considerably. The hardest part is trying to get those smooth flows of " beading" that look so good on a fine weld, and that comes from moving the welding grip at right speed with slight wave action to determine width of weld. But you also need to learn how to adjust the amperage to suit what thickness of metal you are welding, so someone who knows it already can speed that up for you. But for sure, a friend who knows how to weld along with some scrap pieces and a weekend...you will be proficient enough to do most flat welds. (Vertical welds are much harder, though easier on a MIG welder)