I don't think that ACS/OpenACS is a good platform to
learn. It's way too complex and learning curve is too steep. It's a good platform to build sites if you have a lot of experience and/or are ready to bite the bullet. I can imagine that a newbie might get to the point of launching the default site following step-by-step guide but:
- he won't learn much in the process
- he won't be able to do anything more than that (and become frustrated as a result)
While psets are useful, don't make it sound like nothing can be learned without them. They are just problems to solve with some tool specific hints about how to solve them. If one really has no idea what would be useful to do, it should be possible to solve pset problems in just about any web server that can embeed some scripting language and talk to a database.
