1) HTML/CSS -> PHP/MySQL -> Javascript -> Python 2) Random tutorials online and an O'Reilly PHP/MySQL book. 3) Yes, and that was critical. I basically learned

1) HTML/CSS -> PHP/MySQL -> Javascript -> Python 2) Random tutorials online and an O'Reilly PHP/MySQL book. 3) Yes, and that was critical. I basically learned what I needed to get the next thing done 4) A friend helped get me pointed in the right direction, and I took it from there. 5) General best-practices. I started with just notepad and had horrible coding style. I think just having someone to answer questions and occasionally review code would have been a tremendous help. Although PHP pretty much sucks as a language, it was extremely gratifying to see my work progress quickly ("Look, I made that dynamic list out of values in a database!").