I know a guy (not in Kenya currently) who just woke up one day and decided that an application that he had coded in php was better done in Java. He'd never done any java before, so he started to learn on that day and 2months down the line, the billing system (yes, he'd managed to reverse engineer the Alepo RBS) was up and running.
Oh, and he'd never been to university either. Just some aviation college.

So, as you can guess, all the resources are on the web. You can also rely on IRC.
Practically that is how he ended up doing stuff with Java. He was already doing things with Perl, PHP, C++, etc.