There are plenty of good entry-level tools now available for the ESP8266. There's an Arduino bootloader, with full support in the Arduino IDE including TCP/IP and HTTP APIs. You can serve a "hello world" over HTTP in about 20 lines of code. I wouldn't suggest it for someone with zero microcontroller experience, but it's not terribly difficult to make the leap from basic Arduino projects to the ESP8266.

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/esp8266-thing-hookup-gu...