How can one get web development jobs from home? And are they in demand/easily attainable these days?

What are your skills? How much experience do you have? What part of the world do you live in? What kind of work do you want to do?

Not to be rude, but creating threads like this isn't going to give you any answers. Just start programming and see where it all goes. You can't know what you like until you really get started and explore things.

I think this is the 5th one you started on this topic. If your only motivation to program is to make money, you are looking at a long road of misery.

Doesn't hurt to ask though right? My motivation is two fold...money and enjoyment. I do enjoy the nature of the work a lot and have been learning as much as I can in my free time. Problem is I don't know where to look to find the jobs that offer contracts to work out of home. Craigslist has nothing. Some of the other bigger job posting boards were pretty much useless too. So I was curious as to where people find these gigs.

Do you have a portfolio of projects you've completed?
If you don't have any background or any work you've completed, you really have to get lucky which won't happen.

Do projects on your own time that shows demonstration of things you think would get you hired and then hope someone tests you out by hiring you for a job.

Like your question is really broad because I don't know if you want to work for a company at home or just do freelance work. Whichever it is you probably are not ready if you're asking this.

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And how is the motivation of this relevant? What difference does it make if you are learning to program? Do you think you write different for loops on a website than you do on a mobile game?

I have no idea where you live, but I see ads for this kind of work all the time in Los Angeles. They tend to want Drupal or Wordpress. If using WP and Drupal didn't make me want to blow my brains out, I'd be doing it myself.

I've worked from home since 2007 and that was basically my path.

Eventually through networking/referrals etc the freelance stuff turned into long/longer term contract work.

Similar here, I've worked at home since 2006 (with poker) and after black friday re-freshed my coding skills for 6 months and have worked from home doing programming and technical writing since the tail end of 2011.

I'd say if you want to work from home find a type of programming you want to do (back-end site logic, front end web page development, Business Intelligence, etc.) and learn the technologies that people who do those types of work use.

I think you'll be more likely to land work if whatever technologies you choose if you become familiar with version control (git, subversion, etc) and cloud computing (amazon's ec2, Rackspace, et). Familiarity with these tools will help you better be able to provide value while working on teams from home.

It's important to understand version control, but I don't think knowing it will help you get a job. I've never been asked about version control experience in a job interview, you'll just have to pick it up quickly on the job if you do not have much experience.

Disagree Strongly. OP asked about working from home. Github and other services like it are going to pretty instrumental in helping op both be able to work in a team in a decentralized location. This is a newer development where I don't think the past is going to predict the future.

Also, if he works from home in a team and doesn't use github, he'll have to put up with so many annoying meetings, phone calls, etc. that he might as well just go work at a corporation.

Can you elaborate on how you have developed your contacts? I have done a few gigs for people on 2p2, but other than odesk etc, I am having a tough time finding people that need work done, even though I have what I would think are in demand skills (rails, php, wordpress, AWS/openstack, devops etc).

The majority of my contacts where through poker and 2p2. I spent a lot of time early on just helping people and getting involved in things that I found interesting. Most of the time I worked for equity/free. Doing that led to a lot of referrals and paying jobs.

first you need to build a portfolio and write a good resume.
They I would recommend you 1) try to find a job on freelancer websites
2) check monster or dice searching for "remote" keyword
3) offer your services through different forums (similar to this one)...stating that you can develop something for reasonable price and with high quality... also add that you can provide future support recommendations, etc
it's not that simile when you are just starting... but your advantages is that you are willing to work and could probably do this for less money than someone with huge experience i this industry.
Actually it's not that simile to find a good freelancer, so you definitely have a chance :-)