The Web Standards guru
I am a firm believer of standards and best practices in general, and WebStandards in particular. For those of us who remeber the first Browser War (IE4 versus Netsacape 4) where every site had at least four flavours (older Netscape, older IE, NN4+ and IE4+) which shared practically nothing and where CSS was just a wt dream, todays mess is not so bad. But still. You WANT standards, you really do.
Becoming the Web Standards guru
Things move along fast, really fast. Five years ago i dedicated my professional life, and a good chunk of my spare time to WebStandards projects; the Semantic Web, Web Accessability and cutting edge CSS 2. In my not so modest own words, I was a Web Standards guru. However, life changes and my coding since then has been bash scripts, SQL and Office. Now, I want to change that and get back in the Web Game, I am overwhelmed with what have happened. You can still whip up some HTML, but if you want to be at the top, you need to start learning, And that is what I am trying to do.
Below you will find a list of stuff to read. My firm opinion is that it is important to know WHY you do stuff, because when stuff break (and they will, trust me) the amount of troubleshooting you do is directly related to how much you already now). Background is quite often about problems and what the problem consists of and how you can theoretically solve them.
Then you need the tools, and really know how to use them and, most importantly, know what problem they are trying to fix. The hammer is probably the best allaround tool since the beginning of time, but it is pretty useless when it comes to sowing. Know the merits and limitations of your tools. That is the key to using more than one tool at a time. Using multiple tools together is where the challenge is and the magic begins. I would however suggest that you learn one tool at a time.
Stuff to read
Responsive Web Design
Framework for Designers
960 Grid System (slideshare)
Stuff to learn
HTML5 Boilerplate (present in Bones)
960 Grid System (present in Bones)
Google Web Fonts
Responsive layouts
LESS
jQuery
Optional stuff
1140px Grid
The Square Grid (I really like this look!)
Blueprint CSS
320 and up
Sketchboards
Adapt.js - Adaptive CSS
Respond JS
Formalize Me (teach your forms some manners)
SASS (Style with attitude)
Inspirational stuff
Hicks Design (Responsive Web Design)