How To Learn Django / Python in a Month

So quick disclaimer before jumping in. I had some background in coding but never really did it enough to get proficient at it. I learned originally in Java in High School but only played around with it in College for some projects. As such I had a decent understanding of some of the general concepts that might take someone more time to grasp.

Now, on to the fun stuff. Around march I decided to quit my job (great timing, I know) to try and work on a company idea for a service to find car shows on weekends. The problem was, I am an Electrical Engineer and really had never done any web development.

Well, COVID happened and then Pluralsight offered a deal where April was free for everyone. I decided to take advantage of that by putting all of my time for the entire month into learning a combo of Django, Python and CSS/HTML/JS.

I started with the intermediate Python course which I really enjoyed. Obviously if you're starting from ground 0 you will need to do the first course also but I thought they were really well done and easy to work along. With this I felt at least semi confident in playing around with basic python.

Beyond the basics

After that I moved into Django. I started with a good basic course called Django Getting Started. This was enough to get me going with a basic project and play around with various features. I also used some projects available on the web to play around after taking this course.

I wanted a bit more understanding of Django so I also took the code school django tutorial. Try Django from codeschool. I thought this was ok but definitely less good than the others. I was already somewhat decent though so I fought through it and it definitely filled in a few gaps though so for a short course it's worth it.

From there my last course was on Bootstrap cause I had no idea what it was or how to use it and i thought this intro was pretty good.

Anyways, I was able to do this all free and I did it full time, but I definitely came out of April feeling ready to go. I made tons of mistakes on my first site, but I think you just have to pick a project and go for it so you have a goal. You can check out my site Topmarq which is still almost 100% done by me. It may not be the best, but hey I just started!!

One thing I've really had a tough time with is the blog aspect. I think i should have integrated Wordpress or something but the articles are actually quite difficult to optimize and build according to current standards. For instance, my post about car shows in Houston kept having various Title/H1/Meta/Etc tag issues because Django doesn't have a great way of doing this that im aware. Just an FYI if you're looking to create a blog on you Django app, maybe look for a plugin.