Yeah, I remember the bad old days. The most spectacular P.O.S. from those days, for me, was SOAP. It makes me clench just thinking about it and it's wildly ironic name "SIMPLE object access protocol." What, like there are even more complicated protocols to transfer data? FML!

That said, sometimes you need/want to pick up some skills. I think it's good to do these on tractable problems that one can imagine scaling up smoothly, like this one. It's better than overly simple "hello world" and also better than trying to learn from a project where the technology is appropriately scaled and it would take weeks just to figure out what's going on.