This week, I worked my way through Tango with Django 4, an introduction to the Django web development framework by Leif Azzopardi and David Maxwell.
Their book offers a great starting point for somebody with a basic background in python but no experience in web development. I really enjoyed implementing the Rango web application they develop in a systematic, step-by-step fashion.
To follow along, learners have to actually complete the exercises at the end of each chapter. That’s been a very effective learning strategy for me, as opposed to simply reading a tutorial start to finish.
The book covers e.g.
- Creating & configuring Django projects from scratch
- Understanding the model -> view -> template workflow
- Creating forms and committing data to a SQLite database backend
- User authentication & management
- etc
Right now, the latest version of the book covers Django version 4, but I was able to complete the exercises with Djano 5.3 as well (with a little help from Stackoverflow).
While the first 2/3 of the book was great, it seems that the last chapters (covering e.g. the Bootstrap CSS framework or implementing search functionality) may not quite finished, yet. (The book’s companiongithub repository doesn’t offer code for the later chapters, either.)
But I am thankful for the easy-to-follow introduction into Django’s core functionality. After all, teaching backend and frontend web development to beginners might simply be too much to ask for from a single book. So - thank you Leif and David for teaching me to Tango with Rango over the last few days!
Next, I am hoping to learn about styling web applications with bootstrap 5 and, afterwards, taking a deeper dive into javascript (once again).
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