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Ask HN: What level of Python knowledge is required to move on to Django

1 points by yesplorer ↗ HN
I'm currently learning python and it is my first language.

So far, I believe I am comfortable enough to say I have a solid "beginners' fundamentals" of the language.

But the truth is the only reason I'm learning python is to be able to build webapps with Django.

On several occasions I have read the advice of "don't move into Frameworks too early". So at what point can I safely move into frameworks without being too early?

At the moment I can read most python codes and understand what is going on, I've played around with a couple of APIs and have written an adventure text game.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

5 comments

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daenney
I'd say if you can work through LearnPythonTheHardWay you're good to go. It also includes some basics about creating a site in Python through a fork of web.py.

I would advise you to read up on a few Python specifics like WSGI. You won't directly need it in Django but it's useful to understand what its purpose is.

The nice thing about Django is that since 'magic removal' most of Django is pure Python with some cool meta tricks on top of it. A few of those will confuse you a bit at first but once you get them it's awesome.

If you don't feel comfortable digging into Django just yet start out with Flask (or bottle or web.py or...). It has a routing system and a template engine but doesn't bundle an ORM by default so you can start out with building something simple and chuck in the ORM when you need it.

yesplorer
thanks daenney, can you recommend any project-based ebook out there that I can buy?

I tried searching but everything I found seems to be outdated. I would be interestd in something along the lines of Practical Django Projects by James Bennet (apress)

daenney
I can very much so recommend Two Scoops of Django. Good book, goes from basics to awesome and receives constant updates.

There's also Writing Idiomatic Python which is a good read and contains a bunch of useful things.

camlinke
I found that Real Python's blog and ebooks were a good way to look at a few different frameworks (especially Flask and Django). There are a few cases where I wish they had explained things further in the web books rather than just show the code, but overall they should be a good next step after LPTHW. http://www.realpython.com/
RomanAlexander
I started with Django 1.4 as my first web platform, my first time writing HTML, and my first time writing Python for anything more than text manipulation. I consider myself a fairly experienced programmer, so Python wasn't anything shockingly new. It didn't take me long at all to get my first app running, and even now my app has fair bit of traffic per day.

For myself, I found Two Scoops of Django (https://django.2scoops.org/) a great help. I was really satisfied by that purchase.

To answer the title question, my opinion is jumping right into Django regardless of your experience with Python. I don't see the value behind "don't move into frameworks too early", but I may not be as experienced as the gurus of the internet.

Edit: Found out HN doesn't have Markdown for URL linking.