[woodsier]

I'm similar to you. Australian (Sydney), 21, Uni student, tight budget. E-books are great, but as others have said, just start fiddling.

I won't tell you what to do, because I'm still quite inexperienced and other advice in this thread will likely be far more valuable, but what I've done is purchased a cheap slice @ slicehost.com. I taught myself to work with Unix, setup apache/nginx, php, mysql, perl, python, ruby and so forth, fiddle with the internal settings. Then you start learning how these things interact with each other.

I then suggest installing something like Kohana, which is a fantastic PHP framework. By working inside a framework you are forced into good habits.

PHP, HTML and CSS should come first, in my opinion. Once you have the basics of these there, start implementing some fun Jquery and making a small site that's database-driven. All of a sudden you're using 5+ technologies, and from hereon out you'll learn things as you go.

*Edit: feel free to drop me a line if you want to chat some more! woodsier at gmail