Looking for Drupal training in London/SE England especially for building a newspaper site and/or conditional presentation of content depending on which page your on

I'm seriously considering investing in myself by buying some training, taking a few days off my job and going on a course for such things. I've done a bit of google searching but I thought I'd ask here for recommendations, durations, price guides/ranges.

My job is in software development/manufacturing but virtually no opportunity to learn drupal on the job. So I try to do it in the evening. But that is frustrating and slow especially as I want to be away from the screen after being in front of one all day. It takes me a while to get into the zone of all the things going on in drupal and by that time it's time for bed and I haven't achieved a goal so I have to start over the next evening, if free.

By the way I have a personally paid for license for Komodo IDE which I want to use to develop with drupal. Komodo is great for debugging Perl and I know it works with PHP...

So, looking for training in general for the above things and also specifically how to use Studio Multimedia France 24 / RFI pen source modules for the france24.com site.

I have some unanswered questions below which I would invite people to give thoughts on as I will ALSO TRY to ANSWER them MYSELF as I experiment with these modules.

Is anyone actually using them?

Now what? :-
How do you get started with them? I've uploaded and installed all of them to my development site but now what?

How do I actually use these modules, maybe create new content using CCK?

How do I define page layouts and a facility for uploading content to them? For example,
Front page, article page, photo galleries etc.

I want to categorise my content, using taxonomy and list articles in a category in various boxes, e.g. entertainment, arts, history etc. I might want to make the listing of one box be conditional on the other, for example if an article is listed in latest, then it is not also repeated in the category boxes.

I want to know how and where to place items on a page, using panels, views, etc.