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The Hello World example in Google App Engine’s Getting Started Guide highlights the simplicity of developing with it.

The complexity (or richness, depending on your point of view) is still there. To help you get your arms around this richness, here are some resources on components of GAE. Before you do a deep dive, you may want to look at the cookbook for some recipes. The cookbook has sections on the Data Store as well as other APIs.

Data Store

• Overview and Technical Details. This link leads to half-a dozen sub-topics, each at a level you may not want to go to at first approach.
• Rafe Kaplan’s presentation on Data Modeling. An excellent getting started resource.
• Bulk loading data into the Data Store. On the subject of loading data, app3 is a REST interface to the AppEngine Datastore. You may also consider approcket, an open-source replication engine that synchronizes and MySQL databases.

URL Fetch

URL Fetch is the Gateway to the rest of the web. It can be used asynchronously if the application requires it. A few examples of what you can do with URL Fetch:

• CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). Joscha Feth wrote up a nice tutorial on how to integrate it into your web site.
• Open ID instead of the Google App Engine Users API. Using JanRain’s RPXNOW API make it pretty easy to do. See the gallery for a working example. Contact us for implementation details.

Session Management

Joseph Bowman’s gaeutilities provides a session management API implemented on top of MemCache.

Application Profiling

Eventually one arrives at a point where some parts of the application are not as fast as one might like. Guido van Rossum’s Appstat library will help identify the bottlenecks. Highly recommended.

Other resources

Google App Engine based Open Source projects for fun and profit.

Books

I hear good things about this book but I have not used it myself.