I always find it easier to learn a language in a specific problem domain. You might try looking at Django and doing the tutorial. This will give you a very light-weight intro to both Python and to a web framework (a very well-documented one) that is 100% Python.
Then do something in your field(s) of expertise -- graph generation, or whatever -- and tie that into a working framework to see if you got it right. My universe tends to be computational linguistics and there are a number of Python-based toolkits to help get you started. E.g. Natural Language Toolkit.
Just a thought.
