Granted, knowing your way around some standard personal computer applications helps. While I was never part of the computer-assisted reporting priesthood, statistical stories have been one of my specialties from college days onward. Curiosity helps, of course. I got a glimpse of how HTML works in just by reading cached documents on my word processor to see the hypertext tags. Most pages I saw appeared to be derived from templates, the kind of boilerplate coding I used to do on the copy desk.
Tenacity helps too.
Turns out the digerati learn about cascading style sheets and such by staring at codes much the same way. The Web isn't the place for people who can't handle detail work. As an absolute beginner, you may be only months from turning into a seasoned pro. Most lists have a digest feature that sends all the day's messages at once, a good way to reduce mailbox clutter. I also send a message to the listserv with simply the word HELP to learn what such features are available.