For some reason, I am having a hard time understanding all this web programming stuff--from AJAX to JSON, etc.

I've got plenty of experience programming GUIs. I'm currently working on a project in Python, and I thought that maybe I could just use PyJS (since it's GWT for Python, it uses an API that's very familiar to experienced GUI programmers like myself) to compile it with a Javascript interface on top, but alas, the compiler gave me a spectacular failure. It's obviously not meant to handle much of any Python beyond itself, and some of the core Python library. It would have been nice if it could, but I will admit, it would have been the lazy way to do it.

I tried to learn Django, but for some reason, I'm just having a hard time understanding the tutorial on their website, and what it's all doing. Maybe it's not the best framework to learn, perhaps?

Anyway, does anyone have a good primer/tutorial explaining all this stuff, especially for Python, and especially for someone coming from a GUI background?