My advice on web frameworks: Try to make a project without one. If you're where the author is -- tolerably familiar with HTML, CSS, and JS -- look up WSGI or

My advice on web frameworks: Try to make a project without one. If you're where the author is -- tolerably familiar with HTML, CSS, and JS -- look up WSGI or CGI. Write a program that outputs HTML by string manipulation. Try to build something simple, like a web forum, or maybe one of those old-fashioned "guestbooks". Then you will be able to see the pain points that a web framework solves. For example, you'll eventually decide you want to save your forum posts to disk to make them permanent. You make some format which you can just use read() and write(). If you've gone through the pain of doing this, when you go on to read about databases, you won't say "WTF this is overwhelming and irrelevant," you'll say "AHA this makes so much sense -- I know exactly what problem this is trying to solve -- because I've already spent dozens of hours solving that exact problem!" MVC got you down? Well, if you started out with a basic web forum software that only allowed login, posting, and viewing, then updated it to include user profiles and avatars, my guess is that when writing the update you would have encountered frustrations due to poorly organized code. So when you later read about MVC, you say "AHA! I understand exactly what this is for -- because when I had to make major changes to a codebase that was already fairly large and complex, I had lots of pain, and came up with a laundry-list of ways new code should be better-organized to avoid similar pain in the future -- and MVC looks awfully similar to that list!"