If you decide to go with Python, consider a micro framework like bottle.py or Flask. There is less to learn to get productive. If you do anything non-trivial you will end up using a database. MySQL, PostgreSQL are most used. You may want to look in to a noSQL database like MongoDB. I find working with MongoDB very productive, especially when you are figuring / learning things on the go.

Recommended by others in this thread as well but try Coffeescript to write your Javascript and use JQuery for code that works in different browsers.