The glory of being in your position is that you really can't make a mistake here. I'll dispense some random suggestions. -- it takes a ridiculous amount of tim

The glory of being in your position is that you really can't make a mistake here. I'll dispense some random suggestions. -- it takes a ridiculous amount of time to do something that seems so easy. Yes, this is a sign that you are doing it right. ;) Programming always takes a ridiculous amount of time. The only saving grace is that, once the program is done, a ridiculous number of people will be able to use it a ridiculous number of times. So, if you find that you're not motivated to finish stuff, you need customers. Customers are very motivational, and not just because they give you money. Happy customers are very morale-boosting. -- The reason why you can know HTML, CSS, JS, and Python and still do not feel that you know web programming is that none of those things is a database. The database is the important part of web programming. Everything else is frosting. Try SQL for Web Nerds: http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/ http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/ It's getting more dated by the second, half the links are broken, and you will not want to actually use Oracle (try Postgres instead, or do what everyone else does and use MySQL with InnoDB) but I know of nothing more readable and certainly nothing cheaper; most published books on SQL are drier than dirt, and I fear that the online tutorials may be all syntax and no substance. Then maybe look at a framework or two. Other folks have recommended Django, or you could look at Rails. Nothing glues all the parts together like a framework. -- There is nothing wrong with teaching yourself basic CS before you get to Stanford. You will not run out of potentially interesting things to study at Stanford -- either you can study more advanced CS, or you can (hint! hint!) study something that is not CS, like science or other branches of math. If you like reading SICP and CLRS for fun, by all means read SICP and CLRS for fun. Don't neglect other potentially fun things, though. -- If you find that you know language syntax and simple statements but don't know how a whole app goes together, find someone else's app and tinker with that. Read other people's apps, take them apart, fix bugs in them, find bugs in them. -- Find someone else to work with. Get some small but honest jobs on an online consulting site and fix other people's code. Join an open-source project and hack on stuff with a community. The Drupal project is always looking for people... (/shameless plug)