apart from actual coding, suggest a foundation like in CS 101. ie algorithm books (eg O(n) binary/sort) kind of things, perhaps Design Patterns. for lower level

apart from actual coding, suggest a foundation like in CS 101. ie algorithm books (eg O(n) binary/sort) kind of things, perhaps Design Patterns. for lower level, Kernighan and Ritchie c language is a bible. structured and functional (eg python) type programming are good to understand. there are tonnes of cookbooks on the technologies you decide. LAMP and thin b'ends seem effective for most web systems initially anyhow. rails an phython are sometimes thought of as next generation languages. Java/C+ suffer greatly from the amount of scaffolding to do something simple like have a object used between layers. Python and I believe rails, says it will do stuff like setter/getters (scafolding), you concentrate on the logic. php also has some great use, they are untyped languages. typing for java/c++ can be argued as not as necessary as one may think, thats where python, php, and I believe perhaps Rails (dont quote me on that) say again, concentrate on whats needed and not having to type everything. if the web results in a string, then no need to declare that throughout your stack. anyhow, my 2 cents. not the fastest path necessarily, but over time you may want to have good code, useable by others and designed reasonably so its not as hard to get to next steps like scale...