well, I'm completely self taught. I own one dvd, which I have only watched once... and it was not very helpful. (stay away from "playing guitar for dummies") but mostly I just learned off the internet. once you have the basicis down, and are feeling more comfortable, then just learn to read tabs and then just play those. but don't forget to actually practice too... what I usually do, is if I want to learn something better, say hammer-ons... I would improvise something that used alot of hammer-ons. but, most of the stuff that you need can be found on the internet. check out www.riffinteractive.com sure, they want you to buy their cds, but you can just get every lesson just by viewing the samples. it will just take a while longer to load, but it's good software, you can slow everything down to 10% tempo if you need to (you can adjust to anywhere between 10% and 100%) to learn something... it's overall very good software... I can't remember though, you may need to download something to be able to see the lessons.