Ben, what I meant is that no complex platform (which includes, but is not limited to, ACS/OpenACS) is a good way to learn, at least not from the point of view of a newbie. It's because the combined complexity of *unix, managing AOLserver, managing postgres, knowing Tcl and SQL etc. is way beyond what I expect newbie to master in a short period of time. If someone doesn't know what upvar in Tcl does or how to write join in SQL then it's hard to expect that he'll understand a complex system like ACS.
What I would consider to be a good learning path is to first get reasonably good with SQL by playing with just the database, get reasonably good with Tcl/adp by playing with just AOLserver, then get a grasp on basics of HTTP like cookies and headers and only then start playing with systems like ACS that combine all of the above in a quite complex way.
I didn't mean that there is any other similiar toolkit that would be better but that a newbie should do things step by step because a complete toolkit (any reasonable featureful toolkit) is probably more than one can bite at a "newbie" level.
