I left school when I was 16 to do homeschool, which turned out to be nothing more than my parents buying me books when I asked for them and nothing more.
I did my GED and dropped out of college, so I think that I can relate to how you feel. There's a huge inferiority complex that comes from having less education than others. Filling in the gaps is difficult but I've found that whenever I fill something in, I've benefited pretty quickly. Lately I realized that I sucked at systems programming concepts, so I've been reading about that, which has been really helpful. I make a living as a programmer, but I have to continually be studying to try and fill in gaps before I'm hurt by lack of knowledge.
If someone can work through a discrete math textbook and do the exercises, I think they could get a lot out of it. Calculus has some important ideas, but I think the discrete math is much more relevant to every day programming. I took a course last year at my community college that used Discrete Mathematics with Applications, by Susanna S. Epp. I don't recall it requiring higher math than algebra, but it did require sharp thinking. Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science is probably a good textbook, but I haven't used it, so can't say anything about it.
I did my GED and dropped out of college, so I think that I can relate to how you feel. There's a huge inferiority complex that comes from having less education than others. Filling in the gaps is difficult but I've found that whenever I fill something in, I've benefited pretty quickly. Lately I realized that I sucked at systems programming concepts, so I've been reading about that, which has been really helpful. I make a living as a programmer, but I have to continually be studying to try and fill in gaps before I'm hurt by lack of knowledge.
If someone can work through a discrete math textbook and do the exercises, I think they could get a lot out of it. Calculus has some important ideas, but I think the discrete math is much more relevant to every day programming. I took a course last year at my community college that used Discrete Mathematics with Applications, by Susanna S. Epp. I don't recall it requiring higher math than algebra, but it did require sharp thinking. Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science is probably a good textbook, but I haven't used it, so can't say anything about it.