So where do I start?

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Aye up. I am looking at changing my career from the armed forces to something within the web design area. The thing is, I have no idea where to start. I received the DVD and brochure from Conuteach (as it is called on most threads here) and was not at all impressed. I would much prefer to learn from my own resources, the thing is, which books should I be looking at? I have no idea as to how to programme, sure, I have my own site at the moment but that is purely geocities generated and in very basic HTML. I would like to get further in depth obviously. Is anyone actualy earning due to self teach etc. I have two years left in the armed forces and would like to put all my resources into self teaching but have hit a hurdle already (not very confidence boostig at all).

 

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well, id definatly learn basic html to the point of actually knowing the far majority of it off the top of you head
granted all the attributes are not always required, but atleast know all the tags, and what they do etc
then i recommend moving onto CSS, and learning that, the majority of sites these days rely heavily on stylesheets so its a good call
then finally get some sort of advanced web skills, PHP, ASP.NET, SQL integration, Perl, CGI (old), ColdFusion etc
these advanced topics will be what seals you a job, not basic HTML and CSS, although you might get by making small sites for people, if you want a job as a 'web developer' you want an advanced web development skill, and with PHP and ASP.NET you open doorways into other facets of development, including C# and eventually C++ if you so desire

bear in mind I am not a web designer, never have been a web designer, done the occasional lame site for someone flaunting a bit of money, but its not my career, and so my advice is at best taken with a pinch of salt, but from my experiance (and I have worked numerous places that actually have web development teams, as well as some hosting companies) thats the best advice i can give
good luck in your endeavour and hope you stick around here!

 

Super, thanks for the advice, any at this point is gold to me. I will get hold of a HTML book tomorrow and start learning some tags and experimenting. I'll take a note of PHP and the likes also, although I've never heard of them but I have a feeling I will need to in the future. Don't you worry, I'll be around here for some time picking brains.

 

I can recommend the WROX press books, for programming languages such as that they are usually very good, i found the HTML and CSS reference books very good
O'rielly are also pretty good

I also recommend getting hold of macromedia Dreamweaver, some people will say its lame and graphical and overkill, but in any real environment you will be using something like that, or Visual Studio
dreamweaver has the benfit of letting you view code mode, graphical mode, or both ( my fave ) as well as entire site management and structuring, handling links and stuff, its quite good, if you like it it might be worth picking a book up about it too, as it has some complex stuff you find find useful to learn

 

I'd back up what Pheonix is saying, especially about the WROX books I thought their ASP books were superb. Although all being said with the same caveats (never been a developer but worked in places that had them)

I found Dreamweaver taught me HTML because I'd achieve what I wanted graphically then poke around in the code to see how it was done, then hand roll it into my ASP code.

Phil