Any designers turned developers? Self taught?

[serigraph]

I've been a graphic designer for some time and I also do web design. I'm freelance mostly. I actually would like to start doing more development and was wondering about others experiences.

I know some people find it hard to go from creative to technical or vice versa and that is not really want I was inquiring about. What I wanted to know was what is the job of a freelance web developer like?

If you did not have formal schooling, did you teach yourself? Also from developers what is the best language to start learning after - HTML, CSS and Javascript? Would that be PHP?

What field of development is most lucrative?

TIA

[jedaisoul]

I'm no designer turned developer, I'm a hard core 3GL programmer with assembly language experience turned web developer. I'm not entirely self-taught either. I took a course where, as recent as four years ago, I was taught to use tables to build web sites. So most of what I know about web developing IS self-taught. In my view PHP is more important than JavaScript.

[spufi]

If you already know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, PHP and MySQL are the next logical steps.

Beginning PHP 5.3 by Matt Doyle
PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra
PHP Master by Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik & Matthew Turland

In that order. Each cover different things so there is minimal overlap which is nice.