My friend at the time, Winston, shared with me a fantastic website (I believe on the Virginia Tech domain) that detailed how to set up a basic website using MySQL and PHP. It was so easy to understand it allowed me to get started with web development very quickly. What I learned her is still the basis of all of the web code that we use at Coursicle, and I don't really see any reason to change it (we've been able to scale perfectly fine with this setup).
Tragically, they took down the site, but I saved a back-up here.
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