Just start with your project with the book of your choice by your side.
Lots of resources about good books can be found here on stackoverflow.
My advice is to start with making a page to communicate with the server, at least post some data and act depending on the response.
At the beginning stick with base scriplets, don't go straight to jsf tag libraries (or whatever else of that kind), understand what is a session, a request, a response and so on.
