[jimray]

Hot dog.

I've been working on a small side project the past week or so using the 1.5 RC and following along the best practices recommended by 2 Scoops of Django -- https://django.2scoops.org

If you haven't already, I highly, highly recommend picking up the 2 Scoops book. It's got some great, proscriptive advice and is an easy-to-follow roadmap that helps answer a lot of "what is the right way to do this?" kinds of questions. Setting up your settings files for multiple environments, using CBV's, understanding the new User Model features, writing tests, recommended 3rd party tools, securing your setup -- these things are all a lot more clear to me.

And it's actually really well written, not just a bunch of recipes. Their explanation of mixins, for instance, is one of the clearest, most concise I've ever come across. Well worth $12 and a few hours of time to read through it.

[joshschreuder]

Thanks for posting about this book, I've been meaning to get into Django for a while, but I didn't find the official tutorial to be terribly enlightening beyond the basics. Plus there's a whole heap of non-code related environment stuff which I want to have best practice for too.

If anyone knows of any other good first-up books / websites (are there any interactive tutorials Treehouse / Codecademy style?), please let me know.

[jimray]

Fair warning: 2 Scoops definitely assumes some familiarity with how Django works, specifically models, views, templates, and forms. It won't introduce these concepts to you but will help you use them better.

The official Django Tutorial is still a great starting place for getting your head wrapped around that stuff -- https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/

[joshschreuder]

Thanks, I worked through the tutorial, so I know the basics I suppose. But I got to the end and wanted it to keep going, so I guess this book will come in handing for learning beyond the official tutorial.

I'm also going to check out http://gettingstartedwithdjango.com

[simeonf]

If you're interested: I wrote an extended follow-up to the 1.4 tutorial that is a bit more real-world: using South for migrations, bootstrap templates, learning to use the forms library, adding popular apps like debug-toolbar and so on, writing annotation and aggregation queries, etc. See the "courseware" link at http://simeonfranklin.com/pro-django-class/

[joshschreuder]

I'll check it out, thanks!

[johnthedebs]

Note that with this latest release, the tutorial from the official docs has been revamped and expanded.

[pydanny]

Having worked on both the revamped tutorial and http://django.2scoops.org, I approve this conversation thread. ;-)

[danielsamuels]

Thanks for the book link, just got my company to purchase a copy.