[andrewcurioso]

This site gets a lot of criticism but it is a good jumping-off point: http://www.w3schools.com/

It will teach you the basics of PHP, XHTML, CSS, and Javascript. But you might have to do some of web searching to answer your questions... use it like a map.

I personally like PHP because it allows you a lot of freedom. There isn't any framework as part of PHP so you can get up and running quickly. That was very helpful for me when I started with PHP 10+ years ago.

Granted once you get good, for your "weekend projects" you will want to pick up a framework like CakePHP (very much like Ruby on Rails) and start building your apps on that. CakePHP has a nice blog tutorial [1].

Whatever you choose for a language / database / etc. good luck and have fun!

[1] http://book.cakephp.org/view/219/Blog