First if you're doing something with loosely structured data and need to quickly search it and add to it without a great deal of drama STAY AWAY FROM SQL. SQL isn't the answer for everything. It does great with highly structured data and predictable deterministic queries but other stuff not so...
The advice on here is good but here's something from someone who hires devs:
Learn how to work with a group - I don't care how good you are, if you can't work with a team you're pretty worthless to me. My employer (an insanely large and powerful software company... I'll let you guess who)...
If you're doing caching in IIS7 you need to sometimes turn off caching specific pages (things like sign-up forms) or file formats (like gifs if they're dynamically generated to show something like CAPTCHAs or graphs).
Though it should be said this guy used to be a manger at PC Club in Seattle and then Bellevue and I was one of their best salesguys... I can say he's TOTALLY right.
www.clubit.com is also PCClub, they just tried to hide it to seem like a new competitor for newegg and company. If you look at the item numbers they're REEEEEAAALLLY similar.