Your right there arnt that many top rated post on HN about someone running up a small ec2 instance with wordpress and mysql. A lot of web stuff is plugging in the DB and not tripping over the cord. Yet thing of all those crazy frameworks that keep popping up and they look so impressive!

Just something to think about aswell. When things were simpler and there was less choice there was also more concentrated documentation. It wasn't a bad investment to by a book about a language.