Up until quite recently, the most important thing a newcomer to the Web could do in order to prepare for building a website was to buy a book on how to learn programming in any one of the major web-centric languages like PHP or Perl. Then, the not inconsiderable task of learning the niceties of the chosen language to a respectable degree would consume a fair chunk of time and patience. Once our hapless newcomer had sufficient mastery of the fundamentals, applying that knowledge to program efficiently and reliably, with the tenacity to stick with a job until the site was developed could arguably be described as a Herculean accomplishment.

Book photographs courtesy of Dries Buytaert, lead of the Drupal project. http://buytaert.net/