Trust me, there's programming and there's "programming", self-taught programmers are generally the worst (sloppy, inefficient spaghetti code etc.). And then as
@wintergasp pointed out, you're probably also looking at needing a decent chunk of algebra/calculus on top of that.
You can find all sorts of things on the internet, look on YouTube and you can see people showing you step-by-step serious medical procedures. You could watch as many YouTube videos as you liked on triple-heart bypass operations, but you still wouldn't be any good at them because you would be missing the other 99% of the medical training.
Its the same with machine learning and other complex algo trading, you might pick up a bit of programming here and a bit of maths there, but without the rest of the background 99% of people will fail.
As
@minmike pointed out, the people who "go it alone" and are successful are generally so because either they've got academic background in the subject, or because they are academically gifted in mathematics etc.
Someone coming on here saying
"Nowadays I want to use machine learning on trading" and
"shall I get some tips about this?" does not exactly strike me as fitting into one of the categories listed above. The original post just shouted lack of experience and that's why I gave the reply I did.