All right, roll-call. Who is still seriously pursuing this and what kind of progress have you all made?
For me, I've decided to forgo Django for web dev and go strict PHP/mysql. My main goal in learning to program is to have the skillset so that in the future, I am able to seize a business opportunity that may present itself and have that skillset already handy, rather than get a programming job now or in the immediate future.
As such, I am more interested in achieving a thorough understanding of how the low-level processes and architecture of the back-end work. After spending a few days doing Django, I decided that there is just too much abstraction between what I'm telling Django to do and what's actually being done to the database and browser. You can create "models.py" files all day long and never learn how databases actually work.
With straight PHP, no frameworks, shit is a lot slower but you understand 100% of what's going on and get to build a solid foundation of database-server-browser interactions. Since you're building the application if-statement and mysql-query at a time, there is no magic hocus-pocus like in Django, where you may make a 1 line alteration to a .py file, but in reality Django runs a few thousand lines of code that you have no idea about during the rendering of the webpage as a result of that 1 line alteration. Also, deploying PHP from a development server to a real web-host is really as simple as copying to files via FTP. Good luck deploying a Django app if you're just a newb.
So at this point I'm building a crude "users" application: basically people can register, login, provide some data about themselves such as their city, interests, etc and can search for other users in their city who have similar interests. Pretty basic stuff, but it feels good to create that shit out of thin air one line of code at a time and put it on a real server so that anyone in the world can register and put in their info!
With that said, I am still learning more Python, just not for web development.
For me, I've decided to forgo Django for web dev and go strict PHP/mysql. My main goal in learning to program is to have the skillset so that in the future, I am able to seize a business opportunity that may present itself and have that skillset already handy, rather than get a programming job now or in the immediate future.
As such, I am more interested in achieving a thorough understanding of how the low-level processes and architecture of the back-end work. After spending a few days doing Django, I decided that there is just too much abstraction between what I'm telling Django to do and what's actually being done to the database and browser. You can create "models.py" files all day long and never learn how databases actually work.
With straight PHP, no frameworks, shit is a lot slower but you understand 100% of what's going on and get to build a solid foundation of database-server-browser interactions. Since you're building the application if-statement and mysql-query at a time, there is no magic hocus-pocus like in Django, where you may make a 1 line alteration to a .py file, but in reality Django runs a few thousand lines of code that you have no idea about during the rendering of the webpage as a result of that 1 line alteration. Also, deploying PHP from a development server to a real web-host is really as simple as copying to files via FTP. Good luck deploying a Django app if you're just a newb.
So at this point I'm building a crude "users" application: basically people can register, login, provide some data about themselves such as their city, interests, etc and can search for other users in their city who have similar interests. Pretty basic stuff, but it feels good to create that shit out of thin air one line of code at a time and put it on a real server so that anyone in the world can register and put in their info!
With that said, I am still learning more Python, just not for web development.