[apowell]

I'm self-taught -- bought Frontpage in 1998 and a PHP/MySQL book from Sitepoint a couple years later and did all the examples. Building a successful web business has very little to do with how well you know the newest languages, fanciest design patterns, or fastest algorithms. Those considerations are way, way far behind 1) does it work 2) is it usable and 3) did I ship it?

Things that were non-obvious to me in the beginning: version control, database normalization, query optimization, and the importance of reliable infrastructure and testing your backups.