Mathematics for the game programmer. Where to teach?

Question

Mathematics

Good afternoon everyone. I am a game programmer with a year of work experience.
I study on my own. The mathematical base is even worse than that of a graduate of the 11th grade (there are abilities, but I have already forgotten a lot of things), but at the same time, I recently took a course of trigonometry and the basics of linear algebra on my own.
But as soon as it comes to studying shaders or quaternions, I can't approach them. Imaginary units, uv-coordinates..
Maybe I missed some important intermediate step? What should be tightened up or learned in advance. I look forward to your advice. Thanks

Answer 1

To successfully use quaternions, understanding their internal structure is not necessary, you just need to understand how constructors and the multiplication operator work. The mathematical meaning of the quaternion has little to do with game development.
About shaders there is a good site The Book of Shaders , there is a slightly different standard than in the unit, but everything is portable with minimal changes. In shaders, the main difficulty is not mathematics, but in understanding functional programming and parallelism, most things are still done on simple addition and multiplication.
If you still want to improve mathematics, then find somewhere "a collection of problems in mathematics for applicants to universities", there are many books with a similar name. You can immediately skip integrals, but you can solve sines and cosines. You can also play with Wolfram Alpha and interactive charting tools. This should be more than enough, in game development things rarely go beyond vector addition.

Answer 2

Unless you're building your 3D game engine from scratch, you don't need to. Today is 2018, there are many 3D engines out there .
And if 3D is generally difficult for you, then use 2D engines - it's much easier and no less profitable.

Answer 3

Maybe I missed some important intermediate step?

School mathematics.