2) Started with a teach-yourself HTML 3.2 book. For learning JS today, I think eloquentjavascript.net is good if a bit dry and I like Manning's jQuery in Action if going the jQuery route.
3) I started out with the intent of making a WYSIWYG web editor that didn't suck...and I'm still planning on doing it at "some point".
4) No guidance for me, unfortunately. Aside from having a professor in my first Java class say "well don't worry about that, you don't need to understand it for a while", which annoyed me enough that I went and learned Java myself through Thinking in Java. Otherwise I'm entirely self taught.
5) Guidance on what to look at/what to understand would have been helpful. I'm very grateful to the mozilla project, since that's where I learned software engineering. Having someone point out version control earlier on would have been helpful.