The ideal way in my opinion is
1. Start trading manually.
2. Make sure your strategy is profitable.
3. Write yourself (or order from a specialist) a bot that will automatically trade in accordance with your strategy.
Yep, I agree with this.
Some traders also tend to learn how to code so they can start implementing what's on their mind and can save a lot of money by hiring someone to code. And I can agree it is also better to learn on your own so it will be another skill you will learn and later on you can create a bot that what you really prefer and easy to customized or improve.