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by riebschlager 3814 days ago
Aww, what a tease. This is exactly what I'm diving into right now. Since part one was written in November, I'm guessing part three might show up around March?

Anyone have any worthwhile Django learning resources to share? (Other than Django's own docs, which are great.)

4 comments

There's a book called Django by Example by Antonio Mele that I think is pretty good. People love Two Scoops of Django as well. The former consists of a series of tutorials and the latter explains best practices to consider when writing Django apps.
Do either of those talk about Django and scalability/duplication? The two biggest problems I've run into looking for other resources are:

1. Versions -- a lot of printed materials are just old by the time they come out.

2. None of them talk about large-scale projects, only smaller-scale personal blogs etc. as a first project. Or, put another way, many of the resources I find target beginners instead of intermediate/advanced learners.

Scalability--not so much. If you were really interested in building a highly scalable service (5M+ concurrent users) you probably would want to look at a different tool/language. But, chances are, Django works just fine for your initial/early use cases (before what you're building goes "viral" lol) and for most web app use cases on the internet. Duplication--yes. If you are talking about duplicating project boilerplate, Two Scoops gets into this topic specifically (using a neat package called cookiecutter). If you mean replication (e.g., horizontal scaling via replication of instances of your app), then that's more of a dev ops thing and depends on your deployment setup. I would suggest digging into literature about AWS, or whatever PaaS you choose.

1. Versions -- both books target Django 1.8+ (Django 1.9 is the current, stable release), so I would consider both relevant for now.

2. I suggested both books because both are current and different. Django By Example includes examples of projects beyond a simple blog (I think that's chapter 1 or 2). Each chapter introduces more and more complexity with a totally separate project example. Whereas, Two Scoops of Django provides general recommendations for how to best manage common Django tasks/flows. I think both are appropriate for intermediate/advanced users.

Thanks for the in-depth response! I'll check them both out. :)
https://highperformancedjango.com/ awesome book covering what you need
Thank you! I've e-mailed the authors with a few questions about the book. :)
I am about a third of the way through Django By Example and would also recommend it for someone who has gone through the Django Tutorial and is looking for more.

I've found books by Packt Pub to be of variable quality, and DbE does have some typoes/errors, but the content so far has been quite good.

Part 3 will be coming out sooner than March I hope. The reason for the gap in releases was the holiday season, we should be able to get them out more reliable going forward.
Yup - this course for using Django with AngularJS is by far one of our most popular: https://thinkster.io/django-angularjs-tutorial
two scoops of django is decent, but it doesnt talk about the DRF. I am going to be adding a blog post about this in a few days, Ill send you a link when I am done - drop me an email if you want me to email it you.
It would be really helpful to have that.