I'd suggest approaching this from a slightly different perspective. Find a simple problem - say and ajax driven to do list for instance - and mock up a simple

I'd suggest approaching this from a slightly different perspective. Find a simple problem - say and ajax driven to do list for instance - and mock up a simple HTML front end preferably from scratch, hand-coding the HTML. Reference sites abound but I keep finding myself at w3schools.com which was previously mentioned. As you solve individual UX problems you'll quickly get the hang of how HTML does its thing. Pay attention to standards and validate you code using the W3 validator. A good HTML editor like Dreamweaver (free trial available from Adobe) will do you wonders. For user interactivity (alerts, browser validation, submitting data asynchronously etc) you roll out some Javascript and try solving the problem with plain vanilla javascript and then with a library like jQuery or ExtJS. I think this is the only way to grasp the utility of these libraries. Then on the server end a web dev framework (Django if you love Python...) will get you done. Again, try solving the problem without the framework and then phase it in. A couple of weekends later you can add "Web Developer" to you resume : )