http://regex.learncodethehardway.org/ thats a good one on regular expressions. He also has a good one about SQL - it's incomplete, but what is done is very sweet. I'm also trying to go the same path as you. I know a bunch of java and python but when I look at the source code of just about anything I don't understand what anything is doing, and it's very frustrating, so I'm trying to build a very simple framework in python from scratch - but I've no idea how to go about it. I got a million texts but no idea how to connect them.