What are the best books and resources for learning to develop, deploy and/or host Django?

Question

I'm a newbie on the Django scene coming from an ASP.NET C# background. I'm looking for some good resources to help me learn the ins and outs of Django/Python. Any recommendations?

Answer 1

The django book for django!

And the python tutorial for python basics.

Answer 2

Certainly the Django documentation is a good resource. I keep getting told to use it and its been helpful most of the time:

www.djangoproject.com

Answer 3

Practical Django projects, second edition by James Bennett the release manager of Django

The book covers building applications, adding features, practical development techniques like using DVCS, automated build deploy tools and there is also a dedicated chapter on reusable development and how to submit to PyPI.

The book also gives good tips on Python wherever necessary; that way you can develop a good understanding of Python too.

Answer 4

I started with Django not so many weeks ago.

I can recommend to study the source code to the Django site itself. It helped me getting started to do real work as there was a complete and working example to refer to. It can be found at http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/djangoproject.com/django_website/. A direct download URL for the source code is: http://code.djangoproject.com/changeset/10750/djangoproject.com/django_website?old_path=%2F&format=zip (ZIP file, 61 KB).

And it is a good idea to read the first 5 chapters in the Django book, starting at http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter01/

If you are interested in making a blog then I can recommend this blog-entry by James Bennett:

http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2006/jul/03/django-tips-scaling-application/ "Django tips: scaling an application. Let’s build a blog."

Answer 5

• The community is a tremendous resource: IRC, Blog Aggregator, django-users

  http://www.djangoproject.com/community/

• ProDjango by Marty Alchin is a good book for learning the django internals http://prodjango.com/

  "Learning Python" by O'Reilly http://books.google.com/books?id=nEJ-jcYF2fMC&dq=learning+python&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=EBJhSoHvDs_tlAfDncmjDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4

  "Dive into Python" http://diveintopython.org/ (opensource title) from Apress.

• Videos of talks from DjangoCon or Pycon can be streamed as well. And the startthedark.com django from the ground up series.

  http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=D415FAF806EC47A1

  http://pycon.blip.tv/

  http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/?author=8362

• I also understand that "this week in django" is being rebranded as djangodose, yet still many of the podcasts for twid are relevant.

  http://twitter.com/djangodose

  http://thisweekindjango.com/

• The rubyonrails podcast is another great resource. RoR podcast covers equally relevant topics of interest to both Django and Rails programmers.

  http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/

• Good blog post on deployment http://lethain.com/entry/2009/feb/13/the-django-and-ubuntu-intrepid-almanac/

• Make sure to learn pip, virtualenv, and fabric while you are at it. Indispensable.

Answer 6

Most books will tell you how to deploy to Apache. You can also look into lighttpd and nginx.

For deployment, you should look into Fabric, a python package that does SSH from your machine to your server.

Here's my Amazon list of top Django books, for what it's worth. I'm referencing this rather than repeating my comments here. I would point out that Django Templates (not on the list) is a bit of a let down. Not up to the technical quality of the other books.

People have already pointed you at James Bennett. I'll reiterate that. He has a lot of great material on his website at www.b-list.org. Highly recommended.

If you are looking for simple setup and/or support for Django sites, I'd recommend slicehost.net or webfaction.com. The former is more hardcore, control your own Unix server slice. The latter is simpler, easier to start up, but not so much control over everything. The former starts at about $20/month for a 256MB slice. The latter is about $10/month.

Even if you don't use either of these hosts, their websites have awesome tutorials on setting up Django, python, and Apache on Unix boxes.

I'd also recommend getting a free account to github.com. There is a huge community of celebrity Django developers there, and there are lots of projects you can copy to your machine and try out. One of the cool things: you can "follow" other Djaango developers and see what is popping up on the hivemind's radar.

More information on Fabric.

Answer 7

stackoverflow.com? ;-)

Practical django projects

I also like b-list.org's Django category and the Django tag on Jeff Croft's blog.

Answer 8

Found Python Web Development with Django by Forcier, Bissex and Chun a great start. 50 pages on python to get you going and all the basics of Django.