Urllib's urlopen and urlretrieve

[qoresucks at gmail.com]

I only just started Python and given that I know nothing about network programming or internet programming of any kind really, I thought it would be interesting to try write something that could create an archive of a website for myself. With this I started trying to use the urllib library, however I am having a problem understanding why certain things wont work with the urllib.urlretrieve and urllib.urlopen then reading.

Why is it that when using urllib.urlopen then reading or urllib.urlretrieve, does it only give me parts of the sites, loosing the formatting, images, etc...? How can I get around this?

Lastly, while its a bit off topic, I lack a good understanding of network programming as a whole. From making programs communicate or to simply extract data from URL's, I don't know where to even begin, which has lead me to learning python to better understand it hopefully then carry it over to other languages I know. Can anyone give me some advice on where to begin learning this information? Even if its in another language.