Three years back I didn't even know how to build a web page, I had a background in electrical engineering and some knowledge of BASIC and C. What really got me in to web applications were MOOCs started by couresera and udacity. Build your own Wiki was the very first course that I took and helped me a lot. It was taught by none other than Steve Huffman reddit founder . After completing couple of more courses like Intro into computer engineering , Programming foundations with Python , Programming Languages , I had a firm grasp on how things worked. Later I joined a very early stage start up company and built their platform on Django. Django's documentation is crisp, concise and one of the best resource for learning web development using Django. Currently I am working as a full stack developer and have been using Ruby on Rails. Rails cast and Ruby Tapas have been really good resources as well. There are a lot of small tutorials on Tutsplus although these are paid, but would help a lot.