I'd also recommend a look at Flask: http://flask.pocoo.org/. It's quite new but more polished and easier to learn than Pylons, and comes with excellent documentation and handy extensions.

As you say, however, Django is a good place to start for a beginner - it has a larger community and ecosystem of apps for doing just about anything web-related (although the apps are of variable quality). It's also quite mature (5 years now) and has more job opportunities.