Django or Rails ?
djangoproject.com
djangoproject.com
I have PG to blame because his whole advice on "learn to code" was so very true. I'm not a CS major (I did take a 'few'classes) but Rails really makes sense to me. Coding is just so..logical.
Pylons is a very Rails-y framework with the difference being that it is made to be easy to customize. In Rails if you don't like something you are going to have a hard time changing it out unless you are a good hacker. In Pylons that is easy, and you've got access to Python's vastly better platform (speed, Unicode support) and libraries.
If you are an absolute beginning programmer it might be kind of hard to pick up, but if you've programmed a bit or you've used one or two web frameworks (especially Rails) Pylons won't be hard to learn.
There's not a single django book. Or even a web related python book at all. But there's a whole section of Rails books. Now, that isn't to say that you need a book to write a rails/django app, it's just an example of all the energy and community behind rails.
It's got so much momentum. The same kind of momentum php once had.. It's only a matter of time before the tools get better and better because of it. Working in Django might be nice, but I really think it will be more like swimming upstream.
The book is coming in a month. One big reason why there aren't a lot of Django books out there is because instead of trying to make money off of books, they focused on writing high quality documentation to begin with. That book that's coming out is free online as well: http://www.djangobook.com/
The reason there are lots of Rails books is because there's a lot of hype around it. That doesn't necessarily mean the community is more supportive.
Also see our docs, at http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/ .
Disclaimer: I'm a Django developer and coauthor of the book.
My point was just that there's so much behind rails right now that it sure seems like any issues with it scaling will get worked out more quickly than they might with other frameworks. There's also already an ecosystem of 3rd party apps around it.
You learn better by not buying a book and start coding.
As said before Django is very logical.
I read "Learn python in ten minutes" and just tried django.
http://www.poromenos.org/tutorials/python
As Adrian said, the online docs and books are very helpful and you can ask anything to the django users group :
http://groups.google.com/group/django-users/
You can also check out some code here :
I really never imagined it being this addicting/fun/satisfying.