Take these courses to get web dev savy, in order:
- http://discover-devtools.codeschool.com/ - Become a DevTools Ninja.
- http://try.github.io/ - Git skillz...
- http://try.jquery.com/ - quality jQuery knowledge.
- https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/cs - Easiest to follow, free, most in-depth going into advanced Javascript.
- https://university.mongodb.com/ - mongoDB is the hotness for modern, sexy web apps.
All of these courses result in badges or symbols of course completion. Specifically the CodeSchool courses have OpenBadges awarded for example here's my CodeSchool "Report Card" page: https://www.codeschool.com/users/705399 All of the skills in these courses are used in the real world work you'll engage in the wild. Best of luck out there. Ping me @mikeumus with any questions along your path.
If your looking to get started on real-world projects right away you can always contribute to an open-source project. I'm an owner of the GitHub for the DocPad project and developing plugins for DocPad or tending to issues in the form of pull-requests is a great way to earn major street-cred: https://github.com/bevry/docpad Hacking on your own open-source GitHub projects will have a similar effect.
Stay Frosty my friends...
Hackathons never hurt either of course. NASA's Space Apps Challenge is this weekend: https://2014.spaceappschallenge.org/
It's literally the biggest global weekend hackathon on the planet as it's hosted simultaneously in hundreds of locations. The epicness can't fit inside words....