[nikdaheratik]

As far as equipment goes, I heart my MBP, but anything with an SSD drive that runs some flavor of Unix/Linux is what you need for most development. Adjust what you buy according to your budget, but unless you're wanting to do 3D graphics, the SSD is a much bigger usability factor than the processor in most laptops.

The learning curve for web related tech is much gentler than iOS or other compiled programming in that you can produce usable projects more incrementally and learn more about how stuff works as you go along. Just pick up an oreilly or other tech book on the framework you want to learn and it'll walk you through. You don't need a CS degree to learn how most of it works and it doesn't take long hours. It just takes patience and being willing to Google/man -k the things you don't know. And there will be alot you don't know.

Django is very friendly on the learning curve side, but deployment can be tough. I don't know about Ruby on Rails as I haven't touched it. PHP has a low learning curve, but also a large community of less capable users which can give it a bad rep.