yes i feel that i do understand the most basic stuff, plus i've taken some programming-ish classes in college as well (such as VBA for Excel and another freshman class which also dabbled a little in basic programming principles). i'm just at a complete loss as to how to go from that basic understanding, to actually being able to write something useful and then subsequently be good enough to be hired as a junior or entry level developer. my ultimate end-goal is to develop software for my own startup because i have many ideas which i have previously tried to hire outside developers to implement, but failed miserably.
I really think you need to start with a very simple project that you can see through to completion. Writing your own blog or calendar app is pretty simple if you don't try to add any advanced features (like WYSIWYG editing or something like that).
For a blog, just make a new post page where you can type in a new post and then an index page that shows all posts. If that's too simple, make a log-in system and support for multiple authors.
For a calendar, just make it so you can click a day and type in an event which gets stored and shown when you load the page. If that's too simple, do multi-day events and recurring events. Or build a week view and a single day view as well.
This is the kind of project you would build in classes. It's the only way to really learn how everything fits together to make a full web app. Learning on the job is pretty much the only way to really learn software development.
You have to crawl before you can walk. You'll learn with practice, probably years of practice. Start with small things. Make a HackerNews clone with PHP and a database. Make a Snake clone with Python, but don't use PyGame.
i'll read those links right now! thanks!