Of course not.

It's practically requisite to understanding Rails or Django and is not so hard a project that you can't start to tackle it quickly (by reading any of the hundreds of simple web server tutorials online)

Reading through the source for a simple http server might be a good first step. srv.arc (the server that runs this site) is only 360 lines and is pretty readable without a deep understanding of Arc or Lisp.

I actually agree. I have been programming for the web for about 8 years now and looking back, I wish that the web server had not been such a mystery - it would have been helpful.