This was the most frustrating part of learning this stuff while growing up; I quickly got into more esoteric issues and complicated questions than I could find answers to from the limited circle a ten year old has. The big breakthrough was a teacher who let me use his Internet connection to post on newsgroups. I was always amazed at how incredibly helpful people were on there, even at big name companies at the time. This was in the early-to-mid 90s. I even had someone from Microsoft explain and correct code I had been sharing to make a silly TSR that would bounce a smiley face around the prompt (which was an existing .com executable I was trying to reproduce)

Depends, I was an havid magazine collector of PC Techniques, The C Users Journal (latter The C/C++ Users Journal), DrDobbs, Crash, Amiga Format, Computer Shopper UK, Portuguese and Spanisch versions of them like Spooler, Microhobby, Micromania, Programacion and the local library computing section.