Django Beginner Series - Introduction
Some Twitter followers could already know that I am working on a book. Just not what it is about. Big announcement: It will be about web application development using Django. It is supposed to be an easy entry in the world of Django and tries to cover as much as possible in a simple way to get started with the framework.
If you do not care why I am doing this skip to "ideas and how this blog is involved" to get an idea what tutorials I will post in the course of the next weeks.
Django is the best documented project I know. You can find nearly anything in the documentation and if you are not comfortable browsing it you can just read the code with comments. But there is something Django lacks. I know that not everyone agrees with me on this. But I also know how many people asked me basic things they could not figure out just from reading the tutorial. Django needs some basic introduction material.
I do not think it would be wise to rewrite the whole documentation. If I want to know something about a model field, how a battery works or just see if there is something I am missing about a problem the documentation is great. But it does not walk you through the process of creating a basic application that actually works. At least not good enough as it looks to me.
I am aware that there are great resources and that there is even a "community driven book". But this brings me to another point. There are nearly no books written in German about Django. I think I have seen one. Sometimes it only has a little paragraph, maybe a chapter in a book about Python but nothing serious. Other books, written in English, are just so outdated it hurts.
I enjoy working with Django and my company realizes projects based on it on a regular basis. I would love to see more people using Django and I think this could be a way to give something back to the project. A little thank you, spreading the word and showing the great possibilities and reasons why more people should consider using Django.
Ideas And How This Blog Is Involved
I know that I am not in the position to provide a solid English translation of the book directly after it is finished. Not without some help. And I am also not sure when I will find the time to translate it. So I had another idea.
In the book I will use examples that are supposed to help my readers with real world problems. We will build
- a basic content management system
- some kind of wiki
- a tumblelog
- something that will remind you of Twitter
Beside the basic idea how to start such projects I can introduce management commands, migrations, templating, user accounts and profiles, project layout and structure and other stuff without boring everyone to death.
To reach more people I will link the examples in this blog and add tutorials how everything is put together.
The four "big projects" are currently only ideas. I am still looking for some input what I should include and what I should leave out of the tutorials. The goal is pretty simple: "Introduce enough features so everyone has a basic understanding how Django works and hopefully will be able to realize any project with the help of the documentation". I refuse to copy big parts of the docs, this would make the whole project pointless.
If you have any ideas, wishes or comments send me a mail, comment on Hacker News or send me a tweet.