If you're hoping to get into web development, then you'll need to learn quite a lot of pieces of technology. For a professional, the minimum knowledge base is TCP/IP networking, HTTP, HTML, Javascript, the DOM, SQL, a bit of UNIX shell, and at least one general-purpose programming language like Python, Ruby, or PHP.
As a hobbyist, you can start smaller than that, of course. Learning HTML and a bit of Javascript is a great start -- if you can build simple client-side dynamic apps, moving into server-side scripting is a lot easier. Configuring a basic Linux server to host web applications (even if it's just a virtual machine, or a spare PC under your desk) is a big step forward, too.
As an economist who may want to do some web development, though, you might gain as much from learning a general-purpose language like Python as you will from web development. Being able to toss out a quick script to do your simulations or mine an existing data set may prove substantially more valuable to you than an in-depth understanding of PHP and Apache configuration.
As a hobbyist, you can start smaller than that, of course. Learning HTML and a bit of Javascript is a great start -- if you can build simple client-side dynamic apps, moving into server-side scripting is a lot easier. Configuring a basic Linux server to host web applications (even if it's just a virtual machine, or a spare PC under your desk) is a big step forward, too.
As an economist who may want to do some web development, though, you might gain as much from learning a general-purpose language like Python as you will from web development. Being able to toss out a quick script to do your simulations or mine an existing data set may prove substantially more valuable to you than an in-depth understanding of PHP and Apache configuration.