Two parter: Django book recommendation + Django real world advice [closed]

Answer 1

The single greatest thing you can do to make your life with Django better is -Learn Python-

I have watched people inundate the mailing lists and IRC with problems directly related to their lack of language knowledge. I am not even talking about hard concepts, but rather things like this example interaction:

User: How do I display all the things in a query
Developer: It's an iterable list. You do it the same way you would with any list
User: Uh, I'm new to python how do I do that.

That is an example of what you don't want to be asking when you try to get django help.

Answer 2

1. a. Use the IRC Channel mentioned #django on freenode

   b. Use stackoverflow whenever you have questions you will get well informed answers in minutes but it seems like you got that one locked down.

   c. The django book at http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/ (you'll want the second version in english i suspect)

   d. The django documentation found at http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/

   e. Django Snippets found at http://www.djangosnippets.org/ (good for simple snippets of code just like it sounds)

   f. A django book I like a lot is by Apress called Practical Django Projects, Second Edition found here: http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219386

   e. Nice django/python video tutorials found here for example:http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/video?name=1100000 (these really helped me get started) Showmedo also has other great video tutorials on django.

2. Tips ... umm use the links/ideas above ... a lot.

Answer 3

I like the Practical Django Projects as mentioned in piquadrat and Travis' answers.

The author James Bennet is putting all the code samples into a Mercurial repository on BitBucket so you can follow the code as it progresses through the book (only the first three chapters' code is up there at the moment). If you decide to buy the book, it's a good excuse to learn the basics of revision control with Mercurial.