I did so! (quirks of the path I took in the French educational system)
I went through a book similar to the one above, with no internet connection. The first few weeks were rough: I did not quite know what a type was and the compiler error messages were unforgiving and hard to understand without that context. But, once I grokked the core ideas (a proper idea of what could be done with recursion took much longer), things went surprisingly smooth. I definitely credit it with making me a better programmer.
How old were you?
I started programming at 18 right after highschool (which, I guess, is late by HN standards: a number of my peers had played with Python first and hated Ocaml).