How I learned Django in 3 Months

hey guys so in today's video I wanted to talk about learning django and just to share with you my personal story how I learned it and maybe go over a few misconceptions that people might have on things like how long it might take and where you should go for resources and how you should actually go about learning this so before I get started the first thing I wanted to say is this video and the things I'm gonna say are gonna be relevant to any language or framework so I'm just tailoring it to Django because that's where most of my viewers are from maybe you followed my tutorial series maybe my crash course or some of my projects but it's really relevant for anything so this is more of how to learn how to code and tips for that so before we get into the actual video here I started adding props to my videos I don't know why and I don't know if I'll continue this but today's prop is this book and I my wife got me and it's just a guy sitting there and thinking very deeply and she says that when she bought it it was something that reminded her of me when I get deep into thoughts so it kind of has set a mental value to it so I really like it so that's today's prop so let's go ahead and get right into the video so the first thing is there is no one resource or book or series out there that's going to teach you everything you need to learn you're gonna have to follow something like this especially if you're self-taught and really use these as a resource and as a guide but you're gonna have to do a lot of learning on your own for example when I started I actually found a series from a channel called the New Boston where we built out this this app in about 40 videos and this probably only this probably taught me maybe 5% of what I needed to know I mean it was it was really in-depth but I needed to really go a lot further beyond that so once we built out that project what I would do is start trying to reverse-engineer it I started I had the final application once I finished the series but in this process you're learning so fast you're you're just trying to build along with some guy teaching you so you really need to understand why it was built away that it was so what I would do is get that project start breaking the code try to add my own features to it see if I can understand why it was built that way and go back through the videos and try to understand it from there what I would do is actually I think I spent probably two weeks just rebuilding the same application to where I didn't have to use that series anymore to to build it so I kind of took off the training wheels and started building the app myself seeing if I can do it from memory and at this point I pulled up documentation and whenever I ran into an issue I didn't allow myself to go back to the tutorial series I just used a documentation and Stack Overflow to see if I can answer my own questions so really get into good habits of doing your own research and asking the good questions so from there what I would do is once I finished that up I actually started building out a bunch of projects there was a couple of channels that kind of stood out one was Cori Shafer another was traversée media coding for entrepreneurs all these channels had different projects so what I would do is go to go through those channels and I would try to build each project and again do the same thing rinse and repeat try to break it try to understand it and do my own research so there was times where I would build a polling app sometimes I built a Twitter clone so really diversifying my thinking to help me see it from different perspectives because if we're just watching following one path you're really not learning you're just learning how to follow but it really helped me understand different people's perspectives and teaching and just see it in a different way there's many times where I would actually watch a very similar series because I wanted to see if one guy would wear one teacher would teach me in a different way maybe something that the last teacher might miss because a lot of these guys I've experienced experienced it myself when I'm teaching we have to fit in a concept into fifteen to thirty minute video and it's really hard to cover everything and explain everything you need to know about that concept so we give you an overview then it's your job to do that research so that's what I would do for a while but there was no books on Django at least nothing I've seen a few but I've never really followed any I just used these series or these videos online and followed them and even paid for a few courses one of them was coding for entrepreneurs I paid about $30 I think for for one of his courses but for the most part it was just following these videos online and building out these projects so I got pretty heavy into actually making these projects and one of the projects that I recommend everybody try when you're starting a new language is a to-do app and I've seen people make fun of these and saying that it doesn't really teach you anything but if you're just starting you're trying to not build you know you're not trying to build the best application you just want to get the app set up and understand how to handle basic operations like creating items deleting items adding them to a database and so on so I would recommend doing something like that and that's what I did I actually have a few of my own that I'll link up but I would start building these to-do apps and I would start adding my own feature so that's my next piece of advice is try to go beyond and actually start adding your own feature so if you're following a to-do app try to add some search functionality don't rely on a teacher teaching you this but try to do research and figure out how to apply search functionality to Jango there's a lot of videos out there so just try to look up Jango search form something like that and start adding those features maybe try to add in some authentication to where users can sign up and then use a to-do app so really try to expand your thinking by trying to add your own features and building your own stuff into the app and then try going beyond and building different applications so after all this once you've really built up a little portfolio of projects that you follow follow it along with the real test to understanding if you if you really grasp the concepts is to try to build something of your own it doesn't have to be too extravagant but try to build your own app from the ground up where there's no tutorial series on it and try to see if you're capable of wire framing something and then piecing it together and actually making it work it's okay to use Google for read for references maybe you need to still do some research that scope that's gonna happen I still do research today but try to build your own application again it doesn't have to be extravagant try to make a to-do app but maybe make this a recipes app or an expense tracker that totals the expenses and try to run some calculations and really customize what you're trying to make because Django is a pretty heavy framework a lot of times we get stuck into just importing things and not really understanding why things run the way they are so as you're doing this really try to read the documentation and figure out why it's built the way that it is and why we're doing what we're doing so the last thing I wanted to talk about is time frame and how long it's going to take you to do this so for me it took me about I think it took me a month maybe 20 days to learn Python and I don't mean that I mastered it but I got a pretty good grasp of it but once I started learning Django it was kind of hard to apply those two but it took me about two and a half months maybe three months to really get to it before I started building my own my own product and I know I don't want to discourage anybody because I know some people have been trying to learn this for years that was my personal timeframe and I had a deadline I had to meet so to me it was no option I had to figure this out so I also had experience and learning on my own from other things I've always been self-taught so I already have experience in doing research so that's how long it took me for you it might take you six months it might take you a year just try to run at your own pace and try to build your own projects and get your portfolio going and try to really expand your thinking so that's all I have for this video thanks for watching I hope you found this helpful and can actually apply some of these concepts

Channel: Dennis Ivy

Views: 216,057

Rating: 4.9572191 out of 5

Keywords: Programming, Software Developer, Dennis Ivy, Dennis Ivanov, Django, Learning Django, Python

Id: cRF7hIsIO10

Length: 8min 2sec (482 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 26 2020