Over the past weeks I’ve been teaching myself Django (bouncing between 1.9 and 2.1, due to different tutorials, books, etc.). I’m a visual learner, and I’ve found when dealing with new frameworks/languages, I retain the information best if I can follow along with a tutorial or project. Django is something I really enjoy and would love to work with full-time if given the opportunity, so I’ve been devoting a good deal of time to developing a strong understanding things like the ORM, spinning up apps within a project and more.
So far, the book that has been the most help to me has been “Build Your First Website with Django 2.1” by Nigel George. His writing style is really solid, in that he explains technical aspects in a conversational fashion. Almost as if he is sitting next to you walking you through each task. I’ve tried to pick up Django with various books and most of them I can’t seem to make it past the first couple chapters. I think this is because they tend to gloss over things that matter and come back to them later on. Nigel doesn’t do this in his book. His style is essentially having you build out a section of code, and explaining what is going on line by line afterward. Then he has you run the code to see how it works in real-time.
Another good thing is that after a couple chapters, he loosens the reins a bit and lets you figure out why something isn’t working properly. He encourages using assert and just going through the error messages in general, because django lets you know exactly what is causing the problem, if you know where to look (pretty much the same way python does).
I’m nearly finished with the book, and I plan on getting his Mastering Django 2 book that’s supposed to come out this year, as this is just a beginners book. Either way, I definitely recommend this one to anyone looking to learn Django using the latest version.
