| I recommend a very good, slightly obsolete book: http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ This is the book that got me into web publishing back when I was like you. It is, as I said, slightly obsolete, so when you finish it you will be an expert on the cutting-edge Web technologies of 1998 (e.g., Oracle). But the step from then to now is not as large as you think. (And, to be fair, the online version of the book has been revised a few times in recent years.) There is also a New and Improved book that covers much of the same material: http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/ I haven't read this myself, and I believe that (as a textbook for an MIT course) it may be geared more toward hard-core hackers than the earlier book, which was intended to be readable (or at least skimmable) by non-programmers. The advantage of these books is that they provide large-scale perspective. I didn't know what a relational database was when I started the book, but I sure did after I finished. |