[hackinthebochs]

I'm a professional programmer and I know the feeling. The amount of things to learn just to seemingly accomplish anything simple is daunting. I actually held off learning web development for a very long time because of this.

Some people just learn better from the bottom-up: you feel like you have a full understanding of the environment you're working with and its much more enjoyable. As you feel like you've mastered one level you can then move up to the next level. Don't feel like you need to rush into building a complete web app using the latest frameworks etc. Once you feel comfortable with Lisp/Clojure, then look into setting up a simple local web server and getting it serving some html. Then add some javascript. Then some dynamic behavior (with Lisp/Clojure). Then add a database. If you dive into it all at once it will drive you mad.