There's probably repositories for small complete tutorial apps somewhere in django land, as for rails. This is the best way to bootstrap yourself, to start wit

There's probably repositories for small complete tutorial apps somewhere in django land, as for rails. This is the best way to bootstrap yourself, to start with something that works, then start editing code , reading code and books about code. Edit the style sheets, the routing, the queries , views and controllers, see what breaks. Better yet, learn the unit testing framework at the smae time. This is how a lot of Rails texts teach programming (TDD), and it's very effective. The trickiest parts: tracing how data flows in from a form thru validation, sanitization, into sessions, gets tied together by associations foreign keys, saved to database and then read out of DBMS, ... Javascript is the other tricky part, i would leave it for last, even if you only have to support one framework (JQuery) and one browser (firefox with firebug). The Oreilly "Missing Manual to Javascript" is an excellent intro to Jquery and Javascript. Parts that look tricky but are intuitive once you get the feel of it: REST, routing, Some other books people find helpful Jeremy Keith "DOM Scripting" and another one he wrote, i can't remember the title. McFarlane CSS Missing Manual (same guy who wrote JS miss'g manual). Crockford, "javascript, Good parts" And while you're at it, spend some time poking around stackoverflow. The mini tag communities around ruby, rails, python, haskell, erlang ... are really nice.