Louis asked me to respond to this, so I'm respond...
The main things that computer programmers have to learn in order to become Internet application developers are (1) concurrency control (RDBMS programming and SQL), (2) data modeling (SQL again), and (3) page flow design (user experience). The old 6.916 problem sets were an attempt to teach these things as quickly as possible and also introduce ACS, which the students would be using immediately afterwards as a substrate for their projects. I still think that these psets are fairly effective on a per-student-hour basis.
If a student were setting everything up him or herself and wanted to learn the preceding concepts plus some of the details of ACS, I guess I'd recommend (a) Linux (I'm not qualified to say which version is best but I'd want one with a journaled file system), (b) PostgreSQL (easier to install and maintain than Oracle), (c) OpenACS 4.x (vibrant developer community of whom questions may be asked).
I think it may be a problem that nobody in the OpenACS world has picked up the old psets and edited them so that the step-by-step instructions work with PostgreSQL and OpenACS 4.x. Learners always get stuck on the trivial stuff, e.g., finding the error log in the file system, rather than the slightly deeper stuff, e.g., interpreting the contents of that error log.
