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You must understand that you need to learn 2 separate things and you need to learn them well.
For javascript on the client you need nothing other than the browser you already have and the Rhino book:
http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Definitive-Guide-David-Flan...
Learn what's in this book! Go through all the exercises and tutorials. Build something. You can augment the book with tutorials you find on-line (ex. Webmonkey). Then you can View Source on any web page and understand what they did (and what they did wrong).
On the server you will have to find any common LAMP stack and load in onto your machine. The execises and tutorials for php, MySQL, and apache should be enough, although you can find more almost anywhere. Build something! Now that you already know javascript, you can include that in the pages you build as required.
Only after you have a solid understanding of the basics of these 2 technologies should you consider a framework. This can be tricky. If you adopt a framework too soon, you may run into a problem for which you don't understand enough about what's going on under the hood because you never learned it. If you adopt a framework too late, you'll be hand coding everything and will never get done.
Most importantly: you can only learn any of this by doing. Time consuming doing. Books and resources any necessary but hardly sufficient.
Do not fall into the trap of only learning at the surface and expecting to find someone else to do the coding. This does not work for a small software start-up. You must dig deep and learn well.
Thanks for finally posting. I hope you came to the right place. Get to work and keep us posted.
Get a buddy, don't do it alone, mate.
Learn PHP first. You don't have to become a guru at it, yet. Go through tutorials, buy a book or two, experiment. Try doing something small that you think you'd need to do for your project.
Once you're at least somewhat comfortable about using PHP, start looking into PHP web frameworks. There're MANY. Pick one. At this point it doesn't really matter which one it is. They all have similar concepts. If you learn one, it's much easier for you to learn the other ones afterwards.
You didn't say whether you'd be coding from scratch or using open source (or commercial) products/platforms/libraries. Typically these days, unless your idea is VERY unique, people tend to assemble rather than code. What that means that you pick products/platforms/libraries that do what they do best, then "glue" them together with your custom code. I'm not sure whether that applies to your idea, but I would assume so. If so, look around for products/platforms/libraries that provide most of what you want and are "battle tested", and extensible (if that's what you need). Play around with them, figure out how to use them, and if they don't work for you, take what works in them and re-implement the rest.
As for JavaScript...jQuery is VERY popular. There are others, but that does seem to be emerging as a defacto standard of sorts. Still, learn the basics of JavaScript first (if you don't know it already).
You also didn't mention what your background and expertise in databases is. You're gonna need some sort of database for this thing, almost certainly. If you don't know SQL, you need to learn that, too.
Once you actually start building your idea, be open minded (and smart about designing it) about replacing any part of the application stack, if after you become familiar with the parts you find out they really aren't that great for what you're trying to achieve.
"Usually I spend it reading all sorts of ebooks and papers and trying to learn new skills." I suggest you switch gears and spend your free-time coding :-). Pick some technology you think you want (you can change your mind later) and start doing side projects in it. Do up your personal home page. Make a google maps mashup. Some stuff to familiarize yourself with the technology. There have already been lots of good sug…
Your university library might have a lot of books on these. Get a couple for PHP and JS and read them through simultaneously. That way, even if one book misses something you get it from the other one and the best part is, it does not cost anything.
You've got to be careful here. The vast majority of books on Javascript are terrible and will actually make you a worse programmer if you follow them. Better to stick with Javascript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan, Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford, and maybe Pro Javascript Techniques by John Resig, especially if you decide to use jQuery.
If you want to do it right, I think you should learn a couple of things. Learn PHP first. You don't have to become a guru at it, yet. Go through tutorials, buy a book or two, experiment. Try doing something small that you think you'd need to do for your project. Once you're at least somewhat comfortable about using PHP, start looking into PHP web frameworks. There're MANY. Pick one. At this point it doesn't really ma…
As for database skills, one of my units for this half of the year is a database course based heavily on SQL, but I have already had a few experiences.
Thank you.
I'm based in Melbourne, feel free to drop me a line.