Thanks for the words of caution mcintyre. I am pretty new to all this, and my approach for learning outside of school is to just build things, and figure out the bits I don't know along the way. So when I need a quick reference to something, the w3schools tutorials are always a quick easy way to look at code snippets.

I have been spending a lot of time lately studying outside of school, but it can be difficult to know what to read, what to code, what to learn. So I appreciate the feedback from knowledgeable people very much.

I have seen that the pragmatic programmers write very good books that have great reviews so I will stick with them for sure. I will look a bit more critically at w3schools, though, and I will definitely check out the php site you recommended.

I would love to hear more advice from people in the industry on what I should be learning and how I should be learning. If you have any ideas about how I should work on more practical things outside of school to give me real world skills I would be grateful for an email: [email protected]