Here is what I want to do:
 
The website is for a small real estate company with perhaps 40 active
listings. Rather than manually put each of those listings on the
website, I want to put them in a simple database. I'd like to have one
page that displays all residential listings in a simple table -- I'm
thinking thumbnail picture, then basic info on the listing. To get
more info, the user clicks on the thumbnail and gets a full-page
printable data sheet. On another page of the site, the user could
click on each agent and see each of that agent's listings, same idea.
On the front page of the site, maybe a box that says "Featured
Listing" and randomly calls from one of several listings in the
database.
 
So. With no working knowledge of anything much beyond HTML and CSS,
what do you recommend? I know there are tons of sites out there that
can help me with many different programming languages, but at this
stage I am pretty much looking for the simplest solution. I do have a
good book on PHP and could work from that. The problem that my lazy
brain is having is -- how much of the basic lessons do I have to go
through before I could jump right in with my project? Do you know of
any websites that could help? I generally like the jump in approach,
and learn as I go. I could jump right into something and make my
mistakes along the way, limp along for a while with a mostly-working
model, and then modify and redesign later.

Many thanks for your input!

In my opinion, for what you are looking for you will not beat
PHP+MySQL.  They are an unbeatable combination that allows for rapid
development of the exact type of application that you need to develop.

If you are new to programming, then trying to learn any language can
be a little daunting, but it's the challange that keeps me going. 
There are many, many great articles about the LAMP configuration
(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).  There is even an oriley site for it,
onlamp.com, although those articles may be a little bit above a
beginners head.

If you find that this task proves to be too much, contact me and maybe
you and I can work something out.

-Logan, Agolna@gmail.com

Two words: Google Base.

Hello,

 In my opinion you can do with that with any programming language but
i think java & jsp is one the good tachnology with struts framework.

Thanks,

Sk

Here's another vote for PHP/MySQL. Added to that some thoughts as to IDE.

To get up and running with a minimal learning curve, I would recommend
Dreamweaver. It can interactively create the type of interactivity you
are talking about with no real programming involved (you would just
have to learn how to do active sites with live data in Dreamweaver).
The caveat: PHP code in Dreamweaver gets horribly mangled in a hurry,
so if you plan to tinker with the code manually it can be a headache.
As an alternative I would recommend...

ActiveState Komodo. Really intelligent code-completion and syntax
highlighting and other things to make the learning curve much easier.
It has my vote over Zend Studio. As an added plus Komodo works very
well with other languages and file types. I looked into it originally
for Python programming.

Both of these have downloadable trial versions.

Another 2 cents... if you're looking to code PHP manually, it will add
to your learning curve but I would HIGHLY recommend becoming familiar
with Unit Testing techniques. I've reviewed my favorite unit testing
package for PHP here...

http://www.gunthersoft.com/links/simpletest