[Perndog]

Speaking of walking before running and learning chords and stuff. Here's my take.

Learn to play a note before you learn to play a chord. Get so you can play any fret on any string with any finger and make it sound great with no buzzing. Teach your fingers how to make this wonderful sound every time they touch the fretboard. Learn to play a bunch of notes in a row in rhythm (any notes, not necessarily scales, as long as you hit the frets you're aiming for and not just random ones) and make sure each one sounds as good as when you play one by itself.

THEN learn some open chords. Look at the chord chart, put your fingers in the right place, and make all the strings ring at the same time. Keep your fingers down and make sure you can hear each note of the chord. Does the high E string ring? No? Are you brushing against it with another finger? Fix it. Then does the B string ring? Etc. If you make sure that all your chords actually sound like they're supposed to without any buzzing or (unintentionally) muted strings, you'll be way ahead of the average self-taught hack. Once you can make all of the chords in your repertoire at least sound good, then just hammer away at chord progressions and you'll get better at switching between chords.

Learn to read music, especially on the guitar, and on other instruments if they're available. Learn harmonic theory (how chords are constructed and how they relate to each other). Reading tablature is good for lots of things but if you're at all serious about being a musician make sure you don't *rely* on tabs to play.

If you want to stand out from the crowd of the aforementioned hacks even more, don't learn pentatonic scales first. Play major and minor scales like you would on a piano.

As for what to play to develop technique...I play NES music, primarily because it wasn't written for guitar which means you rarely get to use easy fingerings (and because I got extra credit in Theory 4 for transcribing dozens of pages of it).