[davidhollander]

Way too "culture" heavy. The only thing important on the list is BUILD, which is 2nd to last and does not include example projects to start building their momentum. If you only have 12 months to become a web developer, I hope all that time is spent building as many different projects as possible and not reading Hacker News.

Also I don't think it's smart to immediately steer them toward MVC framework such as Django or Rails. If you give them web.py or Sinatra off the bat you'll expose them to the fundamentals much quicker and significantly accelerate their learning process. Especially in regards to databases.

Then I would throw asynchronous web development at them. Have them write a simple app on top of an event loop with something like Node.JS or one of the python options (gevent,fapws3,tornado,etc.)

Having said the above, there are more books for Django and Rails if thats their preferred learning format. If there is a time crunch, I would recommend "Django 1.0 Website Development" by Ayman Hourieh. It walks through building a complete social bookmarking app and includes chapters on jQuery and AJAX, instead of focusing exclusively on Django. Which will give them a bit of breadth.