[jsavimbi]

Get thee to Heroku, get thee to GitHub. I'm biased towards the Ruby community, but there are a great bunch of people there who publish a lot of code and related information that you can take a lot of advantage of. Also, the Node.js community is on fire right now and there are a lot of enthusiastic people constantly contributing. Joyent has free shit as well https://no.de/

As far as scheduling your time goes, I would try and use little increments. Get yourself a calendar and think about small projects with limited feature sets, setting a max limit of one or two hours of development a day and cross off each day that you code in red marker. After a couple of weeks you'll notice a lot of progress. It may help you to focus on specific parts of a functionality in order to familiarize yourself with larger concepts and gain expertise, like authentication, messaging, client vs. server javascript, etc.

Most importantly, become a member of a community of developers. That will expose you to a lot more than just dogmatic handouts from the few people who actually get involved in online education and aside from making friends and contacts, may lead to paid work so that you'll be able to line the walls of home with fancy, outdated programming books like the rest of us.