Books
are a handy resource because they'll take you from A-Z and they are well thought out. What
doesn't work well is mixing two books with different methodologies, because you'll start to skip to different topics and
think you know a bunch about the language, but you'll gloss over key details that make life so much easier.
I've owned two programming books in my life; I bought an O'Reilly php & mysql book back in 2000. Read most of it on a road trip while programming on a laptop with local AMP install. I also owned a c++ book with some assembly background, but I skimmed it and decided to just dive into c++ rather than read the book (didn't help that it was over 1400 pages)
I would go and thumb through the book at your local bookstore before you buy it. I've seen some really creatively laid out books that look like they'd be fantastic to learn from. I bought my boss in NC a PHP/MySQL book that I actually wanted to read just because the authors were so funny. He hasn't read much of it though
(good for me, that's job security
)
The most important things to learn are XHTML, CSS, javascript + XML = AJAX [those three are what you use on the client side], php/ruby[my brother is banking big time on the ruby revolution going on right now]/asp/etc, mysql, and optionally server configuration.
If you can get a handle of all of those, you can develop almost anything you can dream up. It helps that learning one of the server side languages will teach you the fundamentals needed for most programming.