If you're really a beginner to web dev then -- efficiently, safely, robustly, maintainably -- is not going to happen unless you plan to do absolutely nothing else for 2 years and working really hard. Web dev is weird. There is no single part of it that is difficult at all but there are so many moving pieces, side-issues, caveats, and ways to shoot yourself in the foot that getting what you want is very difficult.

Catalyst will do everything you want as a platform and probably lots of things you don't know you want yet. The community is also really nice and like PM will give good advice on everything from basics to design and standards concerns. Sign-up for the mailing list and lurk and see what you think. If you can install Cat on your box (sometimes it's easy, now and then, not so much) you can have a demo app running in 60 seconds.

Deployment considerations (100/dynamic pages per second is probably far from trivial -- though I've actually seen up to 150 per second, faked, in my fastcgi Cat app on a budget host for pages which don't touch the DB) can probably wait until you start to see the success that warrants worrying about it.

Update: I just hit the non-DB page (it loads and parses a single, fairly small, file -- through a Model class) a few times and got up to 240/sec from it. My DB based pages never go over 8/sec that I've seen and tend to average more like 1.5/sec (without caching). I can't run a real benchmark b/c it's shared hosting so I'd make some enemies and have broken results anyway but it's very interesting. They always say the DB is the bottleneck. Didn't realize it can be a factor of 200. Angerwhale is a file based Cat blog. I wonder how fast it is. I'll have to look at its internals.