What should someone interested in becoming a serious web developer learn?

[CelticDaddio]

What should someone interested in becoming a serious web developer learn? It seems that there are numerous technologies out there, such as CSS, XML, XHTML, AJAX etc. and it is confusing to understand which are used most commonly and most sucessfully to develop high quality interactive websites. I suppose I can summarize my questions as follows:

1. What are the core technologies one should learn as far as building the website, non-inclusive of the graphics. By this I mean the structure of the website, the layout, the data components/architecture etc. Everthing but the "pretty pictures".

2. Are there any good step-by-step tutorials out there on these technologies?

Thanks,
CD

[Demaestro]

HTML
CSS
JAVASCRIPT

These are a must, once you learn those three things you can create websites. After that you can start looking at making your site dynamic with server side code and databases.

For server-side code and databases you will need to learn SQL for doing database stuff and a programming language like PHP for server side scripting.

There are many options for server side scripting like Ruby, Python, Pearl, and PHP.

PHP is probibly the most widely used and because of this there are a lot of prebuilt things and lots of help available... but the downside to it's popularity is the amount of exploits that are around for it. As long as you are protected by a good systems admin you don't have to worry about that as much.

[UreMaker]

I would highly reccomend a look at w3schools.com they have in-depth easy to follow tutorials on HTML XML CSS JAVASCRIPT MySQL PHP and many many more, I have learned almost everything i know from them.