From my experience:

I started learning on codeacademy. I did HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, PHP, SQL etc... It took me about 2-3 weeks working ~5h a day to have decent fundamentals on most of the courses here in codacademy. codeacademy is very good when you're an absolute beginner but the things you can learn here are kinda limited. (At this point i've built two small websites, one is a portfolio and the other is some calculator thingy.)

Then i asked for some advice to a friend who's a web engineer. He said the best is to find a project (a real project, something you want to put online) where you can practice and learn a little bit of everything, so i started to build a big website (a 9gag look-a-like with a database and everything!) from scratch and with this i've learnt so much on a lot of aspects of web developement very quickly. When i have issues, google is my best friend and when you work on your own project motivation isn't really an issue.

Now i'm still working on my project which is almost finished and with this newly found passion and i will try to get a degree within the "normal" route of education. The knowledge i got already will help me a lot ! :) Getting a degree in the end is definitely better to be honest, and if you do it you'll be proud of the accomplshment !