[Tycho]

Some things that have greatly helped me from my time of pasting together snippets of VBA to where I am now (nearly finished building a Ajax enabled Python web-app that parses English into SQL):

- go onto iTunesU or MIT OpenCourseWare (or just find them on YouTube) and watch the video lectures. The three Stanford CS ones are excellent, and probably give you all the theoretical knowledge you need to proceed. There's a good one on Comoutational Linguistics which helped me get to grips with natural language processing and grammars, but is even more relevant for compilers (though to be honest I don't see why you need to know this unless you plan to actually write a compiler)

- read Code Complete. That's probably all you need to not be a 'douche bag coder' who causes more problems than they solve

- get into web programming. Grok HTML, it's quite simple. Next read Transcending CSS, it might take a month but eventually you'll 'get it'. Then work out how to do events and DOM manipulation with JavaScript (make things happen as the user interacts with the page). You can glue on some cargo cult jQuery here :-). THEN study Ajax - follow some of the tutorials on YouTube or iTunesU. It's not really complex it's just bitty and confusing at first (basically you create an XHR object on the page which acts as a halfway house for data going to and from the server without refreshing the whole browser page). Then finally choose a backend system like Ruby/Rails or Python/Django or ASP.NET or PHP and practice doing stuff with it. You don't need to be a big shot computer scientist for this web app stuff - just leverage the libraries and frameworks and platforms that people talk about on HN, and you can create great stuff. You just need to learn the details, which is ultimately trivial