I took a somewhat similar route. My math education after grade school was poor. I had disinterested teachers with the exception of one, under whom I advanced

I took a somewhat similar route. My math education after grade school was poor. I had disinterested teachers with the exception of one, under whom I advanced quickly and almost enabled me to catch up with my peers, however under the next math instructor and those that followed I again struggled and barely scraped by, often by repeating semesters. Without the math requisites, I was only able to take introductory programming courses in High School. Those teachers recognized my interest and feed me more advanced material while I was with them, but when I had taken the only classes available without those math prerequisites, we parted ways. After graduating H.S. I took to writing excessively intricate batch scripts on my family's XT, and later while working on a help desk I checked out this new "HTML" and "JavaScript" stuff by way of WebMonkey tutorials and free hosting on a new service called GeoCities. Years later, with ASP/VBscript, PHP, and bash experience all from after-hours activities I transitions from systems support and administration to programming as my career, after which my experience and expertise has mushroomed. I couldn't have come all this way without the resources of the Web to back me up.