That's fine for me, but I'm getting ligatures for every st. I thought it was deliberate (and a little pretentious really) but you're not getting them so hurray webfont or something I suppose.
Is it not the case that back in the day MySQL was better suited to running small to medium website backends with simple schemas out of the box? I know this hasn't been the case for a long time but I think it might be a contributing factor to MySQL's success.
Best go with structural if you want to actually learn something. This book ( http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Computing-Systems-Princip... ) is very good and I think still stands as the best introduction to this type of stuff I've seen. It's also presented in a straight forward enough way that it's good enough self-study for anyone with some programming experience.
I wouldn't take random benchmarks on someone's blog particularly seriously. There are many different performance metrics and many different ways to configure your web server and database. Most of the time these things are IO bound in these types of applications. Ultimately it depends on your particular application (which will probably be a little different from "hello world" and so will have a different performance profile). That said, it's not particularly surprising the Go would go faster for most equivalent (the concept of equivalence between programs in different languages is a tricky on itself) programs given it is compiled ahead of time and has complete type information about programs. I would remain a little dubious about the whether the benchmarks involving PHP were really comparing like with like.
My advice is not to sweat it and know that if/when the time comes that there are plenty of options for making things fast such as load balancers, serving static files from another machine, database on a different machine, various kinds of caching (whole page, database level or somewhere in between), tweaking the number of python threads/processes, etc and that you can choose these based on the results of benchmarks. A lot of the time there are big wins to be found in optimising frontend stuff first anyway.
Well yeah, but maybe in real life they wouldn't announce to the room that they need a hug in the first place. Public Internet spaces have different social norms.