Getting started

[RelievedSimplet]

Hello,
I am trying to expand my knowledge of things to do with computers and decided it's time to get started learning how to code websites. I basically have no knowledge at all when it comes to this and am trying to learn from step one. What I'm wondering is what you guys would recommend to learn first and what to do next and so on. What I mean is if I should learn HTML, PHP, CSS, etc first and what to do next? Any information or opinions on what to start with are greatly appreciated.
-RS

[Wickham]

I started with a book "Creating Web Pages" by Nick Vandome which was about £10. It gave me the essentials of website construction using tables. The trouble with books is that they get out of date and don't tell you everything you need to know. (Tables are now not recommended for the structure of a web page, just for tabular layout inside the page, like a table of data or statistics. Div boxes are the way to go).

It's much better to use an online tutorial aimed at beginners and use Google when you hit a problem. If you type a short question into google like "background image position in safari" Google will turn up sites with the official coding criteria, good tutorials and links to other discussion board posts where other people have had the same problem.

Try these:-
http://www.echoecho.com/css.htm
http://www.wpdfd.com/editorial/basics/
These two are slightly out of date but not enough to worry about.

http://www.w3schools.com/ (this is very detailed so you may end up spending a lot of time finding a suitable page for what you want to learn).

http://www.wickham43.supanet.com/tutorial/links.html
http://www.wickham43.supanet.com/tutorial/introduction.html

HTML and XHTML are very similar, XHTML is just a stricter version of HTML and in my view it's worth starting with XHTML as it would be very time consuming to alter your pages later to change from HTML to XHTML.
CSS goes with HTML or XHTML; it's just a way of separating styles like font color or borders into a separate file (or tag in the head section) so that you only have to edit one place to amend all your pages.
Don't even think about PHP yet.