Nope, I did the same thing you're doing now, just teaching myself via tutorials on the web (like w3Schools) and the PHP manual, and help from friends/community members.
:)
If you grab a script that's been purposely built to fail, it has an error or two somewhere within it, trying to get it working again is a great learning experience for correct usage of things etc.
Also gets you familiar with debugging, which is rather common in places.