I always like this blog post about quantity vs quality.<p><a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/08/quantity-always-trumps-quality.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/08/quantity-always-tru...</a><p>Doing a lot of code over the years on bigger and more widely varied projects, you learn to the value of better coding practices and readability, which is on top of a lot of skill doing many different things.<p>The main thing is your a beginner, don't bog yourself down on stuff you shouldn't do, unless you really have to. Work on getting things working the way you want and revisit them on how to make them better.
It's neither.<p>The most important thing is to produce results in as little time as possible. You don't even know if you're solving the right problem most of the time. So you want to better understand what's the problem you should be solving before you spend more time trying to solve it.<p>The second most important thing might be to become able to recognize when it's the right time to change/rewrite code to be of better quality. Do it too soon and you're wasting time. Do it too late and it takes more time.
Get the concepts right, then find the perfect language (and maybe framework) and start building real-world projects.<p>Try finding a language that has some employment potential too.<p>Once you feel you've gained adequate exp and you are either using Rails or Django or Laravel, contact me and I will get you working on real-world stuff.
IMHO writing better code comes with time and practice. So what you probably need to focus on is developing your algorithmic thinking <a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/algorithmicthink" rel="nofollow">https://www.coursera.org/course/algorithmicthink</a>