Vidya development

I'm being serious, this isn't a troll thread or whatever.

Im interested in developing games using C++ and OpenGL. My question however is, where do I even start? In a cg artist, so rigging/animating low poly models and creating landscapes isn't an issue. Can I even learn all this without going through a college CS course? What are the things I need to know (optimization, vector math, etc)? Any recommended books?

Can I even learn all this without going through a college CS course
hell no. You can take one if it is freely available to you, to learn basic stuff but I still wouldn't recommend it since it will be a lot slower progress. Most stuff they teach is useless since you will be working with shaders in any real project and they usually teach immediate mode which is useless.

You will need vector math and geometry. I don't think a book will be that necessary but I already took some math courses so not sure.

I would suggest a higher level library, Ogre maybe. You will need a lot of extra libraries to make OpenGL work for models, textures, math etc (it is very basic, it is for graphics only.)