For HTML processing, you're much better off using the BeautifulSoup module than the process outlined in DIP.
The web services chapter is still solid on generalities, but these days a growing number of RESTful (or REST-ish) services deliver content in JSON. As of Python 2.6, the standard library includes the json module, which converts a JSON object into a native Python list/dictionary. (For earlier versions, the same library is available in the third-party simplejson module.) If you're targeting 2.x, you can always import json this way:
try:
import json
except ImportError:
import simplejson as json
For RESTful web service interaction, Dive Into Python 3 includes a useful chapter on using the excellent third-party httplib2 module, which is definitely worth reviewing as httplib2 is available for 2.x.The SOAP web services chapter is well past its best-by date (as is the SOAP protocol itself). If you need to access a SOAP web service, the third party suds module is pretty good. (As far as I can tell, the SOAPpy module is no longer actively maintained.)
They're both free.
I've been programming for awhile, but I read both books and took useful things away from both of them.