Hey guys,

I'm super new to programming and I've been using appengine to help me learn python and general coding. I'm getting better quickly and I'm loving it all the way :)

Appengine was awesome for allowing me to just dive into writing my app and getting something live that works (see http://www.7bks.com/). But I'm realising that the longer I continue to learn on appengine the more I'm constraining myself and locking myself into a single system.

I'd like to move to developing on full django (since django looks super cool!). What are my next steps? To give you a feel for my level of knowledge:

• I'm not a unix user
• I'm not familiar with command line controls (I still use appengine/python completely via the appengine SDK)
• I've never programmed in anything other than python, anywhere other than appengine
• I know the word SQL, but don't know what MySQL is really or how to use it.

So, specifically:

• What are the skills I need to learn to get up and running with full django/python?
• If I'm going to host somewhere else I suppose I'll need to learn some sysadmin type skills (maybe even unix?). Is there anywhere that offers easy hosting (like appengine) but that supports django?
• I hear such great things about heroku I'm considering switching to RoR and going there

I appreciate that I'm likely not quite ready to move away from appengine just yet but I'm a fiercely passionate learner (http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001) and would love it if I knew all the steps I needed to learn so I could set about learning them. At the moment, I don't even know what the steps are I need to learn!

Thank you very much. Sorry this isn't a specific programming question but I've looked around and haven't found a good how-to for someone of my level of experience and I think others would appreciate a good roadmap for the things we need to learn to get up and running.

Thanks,

Tom

PS - if anyone is in London and fancies showing me the ropes in person that would be super awesome :)