All,
I'd like to check Django out and maybe hack together some web pages to see how it feels - but after having a look at a few tutorials like this one I am starting to wonder if there is any way of getting it up and runinng without typying cmd line stuff for 1/2 hour.
Can people point out some good straightforward resources/tutorials to get the thing up and running?
I plan doing this on Windows environment.
It doesn't take half an hour, nor should you think that development is mostly about writing code. There is always going to setup work and such involved. That being said, I understand your plight. You might have luck finding a project that interests you and already exists. Simply checking out their latest revision should let you run it, poke around locally, and if you make some actual progress with the code you can contribute it instead of going to waste in the name of just messing around.
As someone who just started playing around with Django as well, I found the official documentation very helpful. Just walk through the "First steps" tutorials at:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/
It will teach you the gist of Django it in a very short time. This is definitely one of the best official documentation of a framework I've seen so far.
In order to test it out under Windows, just installing the latest release should be enough as described here (given that Python itself is already installed, of course).
The second tutorial I looked at, was "The Django Book". While this is also written very well, it's a little bit outdated and doesn't cover the new style admin yet. Just beware of the admin pages examples if you would like to go through this tutorial as well.
Holovaty and Kaplan-Moss's The Definitive Guide to Django (Apress) is very clearly written. I was most impressed that one skim-read on a 40 minute train journey was sufficient to explain how the system worked - in enough detail to get started with it. Highly Recommended.
I'll second the official tutorial as a great starter.
If you're new to Python too (as I was 3 days ago), but not programming in general, I'd strongly suggest getting a copy of the Python Pocket Reference (published by O'Reilly). It's just that (essential) bit more helpful than Googling to find out how something is supposed to work.
I used the Django Book, which is a bit outdated, and (IMHO) isn't very good as a dip-in guide. For a good reference, use the official docs. Other than that, trial and error helped me learn a lot about Django.
The official tutorial is a good starting point.
overview: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/overview/
Tutorial: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/
After that, keep the documentation by your side, and use it as a reference as you hack your way through.
With django, you can't really manage to do much without the command line, you should get used to it!
Plus, you won't spend "half an hour" on the command line. just few commands to setup your project, and sync the db.