Ask HN: Was everyone's first web development experience extremely difficult?

I actually disagree with the idea that it's easier or better to start simple. As I've gotten more experience, I like simple frameworks better, but as someone starting out, I had no idea what to do with them. You don't know what you don't know.

Here's what I suggest: find a tutorial that walks you through every single step and lets you build a complete, fully-functional web app. You're not going to understand what you're doing or why, and most of what happens is going to look like magic. This is ok. After that, start to customize your application. This is the part where you really start to understand how it all works. You'll fumble around and get error after error. But after having gone through your tutorial (and type it all out by hand, because you'll inevitably make typos and this is good because you'll start to understand what different errors mean), you'll have an idea of how to find the answers. Almost everything you encounter at this point will be answered on Stack Overflow, and if it isn't, that's a pretty big hint that your problem is a weird typo.

I like to think of it this way: think about how people learn new languages (not of the programming kind). Maybe people will tell you to buy a dictionary and grammar book and "start with the basics", but that's not going to get you fluent and frankly, won't be much help at all unless you've already got some real experience. The best way to become fluent in a new language is total immersion.

Yeah, it's nice to sit here and say you should learn everything about how HTTP works and what happens when you type an address. But you're going to find this out for yourself when you take control of routing in your application. If you sit here without any context and read about GET vs. POST, that knowledge doesn't have anything to stick to.

I don't know much about the Python world, but I guarantee there are tutorials out there that walk you through a complete web application from the ground up. Django seems pretty popular, so you might have some success finding tutorials there.

Each one you have to not only research but do a bunch of hand-on work to fine tune and to make them work together. Then once you get some progress, you throw into the mix improving user experience... heh.

Starting with the 8-bits we had a finite universe, the computer. Add into it a new disk drive or some new coding hack now and again. On the internet you can have too many options and choices, and you are lost in choosing and learning tools than working on problems.