It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated

Maybe. Lots of perspectives and opinions that come along with that for better and worse.

Learning by just consuming textbooks isn’t going to get you far with motivation.

Pick a small goal and work towards that.

Break the problem down in to small steps and find ways of solving each step that works best for you.

You might find you don’t even need any of those textbooks.

To be fair, a lot of folks get degrees in part to avoid the sorts of jobs that require physical exertion, which have traditionally been low-skill jobs. I'm not so sure it is true much anymore, considering that a business degree often gets your a retail management job. A fair amount of those store managers unload the truck along with others.

Carmack hit the nail on the head again. In high school, I had lots of incredibly smart friends who all turned their nose up at the idea of learning how to program. The only person I knew who seemed interested was a sophomore who was retaking his freshman math class. Despite that, I humored him and taught him the basics of Linux one afternoon. The next week when I saw the kid, he was talking about an FTP server he had set up to share movies with his family.

I still get mad about it, because even though I was the one who taught him, I can't help but feel like I've never done anything as cool as that. I most certainly could, but the whole idea jades me and sends me back to the documentation I'm pouring over. Another good example is the "nerds vs hippies" generalization that people like to make: half the world's programmers are immobilized by choice, while the other half is motivated by blindness. Only together can they achieve great things.

What sort of 3D animation do you want to do? If you're talking about shaders, you might be doing yourself a disservice with the bottom-up approach.

In my opinion, learning to use math functions as tools rather than having a deep understanding of how they work is an equally valid approach. I know several great WebGL developers who really aren't very good at math.

Consider the following definitions of the dot product:

A) Algebraically, the dot product is the sum of the products of the corresponding entries of the two sequences of numbers. Geometrically, it is the product of the Euclidean magnitudes of the two vectors and the cosine of the angle between them. These definitions are equivalent when using Cartesian coordinates. In modern geometry, Euclidean spaces are often defined by using vector spaces. In this case, the dot product is used for defining lengths (the length of a vector is the square root of the dot product of the vector by itself) and angles (the cosine of the angle of two vectors is the quotient of their dot product by the product of their lengths).

or

B) The dot product takes two vectors as inputs, and returns a value of 1.0 if they're pointing the same direction, -1.0 if they're pointing in opposite directions, and 0.0 if they're perpendicular (as long as they're unit vectors of equal length). This function can be used for diffuse lighting calculations (i.e. is the light direction facing the same way as the surface?), checking if a point is in front of another point, etc.

In my opinion, the second definition is much more useful for someone interested in 3D on the web, but it's something you won't find in math textbooks.