A friend and I have been coming up with website ideas for a couple years, mostly just jotting them down whenever we come up with a good, useful idea when browsing the web. For the past 6 months we've hired a couple different programmers to make a couple of the sites for us, but have been disappointed with how it's gone. Been too slow and too many miscommunications for our liking. So like the saying goes if you want something done right do it yourself, we're going to do it ourselves.

I know nothing about programming, I've never written a line of code in my life. I consider myself very good with math and about as logical as you can get, but I have zero real-life programming knowledge. The sites we want to make are all pretty 'Web 2.0'ish', meaning user-generated content, commenting on posts, pages that change on the fly, etc.

So here are some of my questions for anyone who's been there before:

Is there a language you'd recommend learning first? Something that is a good indicator how most other languages work?

What web programming languages do you recommend learning first based on popularity both now and the future. I don't want to learn a language that's going to be outdated by the time I'm an expert at it.

Any specific books you'd recommend?

Any general advice you'd give to someone literally starting at square zero for coding who plans on being in it for the long haul?