We're alike in many ways, J. I am a self-taught web-designer who, in his 10 years, learned HTML, CSS, Photoshop, Illustrator, and SOME Javascript on his own. I'm no pro by any means, but I've built some pretty neat looking things without being able to create dynamic experiences/sites.<p>8 months ago, I couldn't write a single snippet of Python. I had a simple site I wanted to build just for experimental purposes, and kept asking my friends for help, until I realized that it just wasn't going to happen.<p>I initially started with Ruby with the intent of learning Rails shortly after. However, I had read enough posts on HN to have me switch to Python with LPTHW by Zed A. Shaw. I got all the way up to the exercises for building your own game, and, frankly, I just quit. I felt I was ready to dive into Django. Boy was I wrong. There were a lot of things that I didn't understand and I had done the simple exercise on the Django Project site three times!<p>Anyway, I kept at it. I continued to Google topics I didn't understand. I went through two Django books and numerous YouTube and videos slowly gripping some of the ideas before I found my saving grace written by, none other than, one of the creators himself. After that, I was able to push out a nice looking site in two days with a lot of help from Twitter Bootstrap.<p>I just want to say that learning by doing is the way to go. It took me far more than 30 days to learn everything that I know, but this is because I had to learn these along the way, too: command line, working with Linux, using a more powerful editor (Vim - can't go back to notepad), version control with Git, and then deploying, which can be a beast of its own.<p>Keep at it!