Perry, i decided to learn how to program about a week ago. tuesday night i started with HTML (dont laugh). i think it is important to know those basics before you go on and learn server side scripting. i tried hackety hack before and php, but the problem is you want instant gratification so you wont stop. thursday night i stayed up an extra 3 hours past my normal time and created a nice html document with my pictures linked from tumblr, added an email form, comment form and submit buttons. off course the form did not submit anything to the server, but now i am hoocked, and instead of pinging developers and killing them with "what's the status" now i know within a few months i will be able to start creating simple web apps. so start small, then once you got html, xhtml and css locked, move to server side scripting.