I really think you need to start with a very simple project that you can see through to completion. Writing your own blog or calendar app is pretty simple if yo

I really think you need to start with a very simple project that you can see through to completion. Writing your own blog or calendar app is pretty simple if you don't try to add any advanced features (like WYSIWYG editing or something like that). For a blog, just make a new post page where you can type in a new post and then an index page that shows all posts. If that's too simple, make a log-in system and support for multiple authors. For a calendar, just make it so you can click a day and type in an event which gets stored and shown when you load the page. If that's too simple, do multi-day events and recurring events. Or build a week view and a single day view as well. This is the kind of project you would build in classes. It's the only way to really learn how everything fits together to make a full web app. Learning on the job is pretty much the only way to really learn software development.