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If you do indeed have 6 weeks - and it's not a spare time thing - you could do the following:

  - Find a computer
  - Install a programming language of your choice (mine was PHP, but Ruby and Python are also fine)
  - Learn the basics through some web tutorial, there are plenty, and only spend a week on this until you're comfortable in the language
  - Find a website that you use often, like Facebook or Twitter. Clone it in your chosen language. It does not need to be webscale. You can use MySQL - in fact, you probably should.
  - Once you are done with the above, throw away the shit you wrote, find a framework in your chosen language (preferably a popular one!) and learn the basics of that framework.
  - Rewrite that site in the framework.
  - Go to a meetup in your language of choice. When it comes time to say hi to people, just be friendly and ask for pointers.
  - If you have time, redo these steps in a different language.
My recommendations are:

  - PHP for the language. It is pretty simple to pick up, and while it won't win awards from the HN crowd, you're here to learn how to be an entry-level web developer, not a Node Ninja.
  - CakePHP is my preferred framework. You could try CodeIgniter, FuelPHP, Lithium, Symfony, whatever. Just make sure the docs make sense to you and you can find answers somehow (IRC, Google Groups, the guy at the coffee shop)
  - Just use Twitter Bootstrap for UI. Done.
  - Use jQuery. You don't need Backbonejs. You don't even know Javascript, so as long as you know how to make an ajax post and update the page contents, you're in pretty okay shape.
You do not need a webserver for any of this. Just do it all locally. You can learn about setting up webservers later.

At this point, you should know something about something. Good luck.




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