Ask HN: Had an original idea for a start-up...but

Should I develop my skills first? Maybe write up a bit of a plan to share with possible partners?

And how did you guys find partners on your first projects?

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

I am in Sydney. Feel free to drop me a line.

Our startups actually work in some of the area that you described (haven't launched yet).

But, i agree with other comments, research around ...most of the time, it won't be unique. But, you'll learn more and more as you do more iteration of releases.

My learning process usually works like this:

1) Learn the syntax/guts of a tool by going through a book, tutorial and trying trivial examples.

2) Work until I run into a problem. (How do I make merb-auth work with a flash uploader?)

3) Find examples/read a book/look at API docs until I figure it out. (Ohhh, you write a Rake middleware to handle it!)

4) Goto 2.

So reading materials are important, but I usually use them to solve real problems. There's no part of this process that doesn't involve writing code.

I'd just search around for tutorials and stuff on what you're looking at (PHP, JavaScript, etc). You really only need a basic understanding to get started. And that's what you really need to do...just get started. Ultimately you don't become an expert by reading books, you become an expert by doing. You'd be amazed at how much you learn by figuring out why something's not working the way thought it should.