One hot title is Effective Prototyping for Software Makers. The issue is that there are several schools of thought.
Some of this is legacy thinking, based on an era where tools were primitive and projects had to be meticulously planned from the beginning. When I started in this industry, the "green-screen" character-mode applications where rocket science and very painful to mock up. Tools and formal techniques were essential to manage the costs and risks.
This thinking is trumped by some more recent thinking.
Powerful tools remove the need for complex prototypes. HTML mockups can be slapped together quickly. Is it still a prototype when you barely have to budget or plan for it?
[You can mock it up in MS-Word and save it as HTML. It's quicker for a Business Analyst to do it than to specify it and have a programmer do it.]
Also, powerful tools can reduce the cost of mistakes. If it only took a week to put something together -- production-ready -- what's the point of an formal prototype effort?
Agile techniques reduce the need to do quite so much detailed up-front planning. When you put something that works in the hands of users quickly, you don't have quite so much need to be sure every nuance is right before you start. It just has to be good enough to consider it progress.
What can happen is the following. [The hidden question is: is this still "prototyping" -- or is this just an Agile approach with powerful tools?]
Using tools like Django, you can put together the essential, core data structure and exercise it almost immediately. Use the default Django admin pages and you should be up and running as soon as you can articulate the data structures and write load utilities.
Then, add presentation pages wrapped around real, working data. Be sure you've got things right. Since you've only built data model and template-driven HTML pages, your investment is minimal. Explore.
Iterate until people start asking for smarter transactions than those available in the default admin pages. At this point, you're moving away from "discovery" and "elaboration" and into "construction". Did you do any prototyping? I suppose each HTML template you discarded was a kind of prototype. For that matter, so where the ones you kept.
The whole time, you can be working with more-or-less live, production users.