That sounds like a great first project. I recommend to break it down in to sub-steps where it's your choice if you want to start front to back (paste a recipe,

That sounds like a great first project. I recommend to break it down in to sub-steps where it's your choice if you want to start front to back (paste a recipe, make it pretty, than add calculations, than put a DB behind it etc) or the other way around. I have a slight preference for starting from the front so the UI does not get skewed in the direction the technology leads you. Going front to back in ideally also leaves you with presentable stuff before everything is done: A pretty website with your fav recipe, A pretty website with your fav recipe and an ingredient calculator, ... About CSS: I guess it makes sense to learn it a bit, but as you want to dive in to the back-end anyways, maybe also check out frameworks like bootstrap with a nice material design theme¹. I'm not sure if it teaches you some bad practices though, so take it with a grain of salt. For my taste the html becomes to ugly, I prefer to keep most of the design part in my CSS. Oh and if you need help the guys on the freenode IRC are very friendly. Just make it as easy as possible to help them: isolate and reproduce your problem, for front-end stuff make a "fiddle" at jsfiddle.net. ¹ e.g. https://ayroui.com/ https://ayroui.com/ Also helps building "mobile first". Today consumer stuff will mostly be consumed on smartphones.