I'm divin', man, I'm divin'. Honestly, I'm actually very comfortable with what Django is and does, in the abstract, and I have a couple of things I plan to develop literally as soon as I have a live site deployed.
First is, I'm planning to move in the next couple months, and among the things to do is sell off my book collection, so I'm gonna write a little app to list my books, with prices, genre, etc - I seem to vaguely recall that there is actually a Python library that enables you to scan barcodes and get book info, which (if that actually exists) will be a useful exercise in importing libraries, doing stuff in views, etc. I have a few other, weirder ideas too, and home automation was one of the main things that brought me here. Start off with little things like this, but I need to be able to share the durn thing with my friends, and I also need a working web page. I hate PHP. I put it up with Wordpress because Wordpress has a huge community, basically, and I figured (rightly) that I would have the easiest time with it, and my goal at the time was more to get my CSS-fu, which I largely have now done. I'm just about ready to start integrating jquery into my designs (as mentioned, I actually did my first little jq piece the other day, but now I need to add an on resize thing... lotsa fun.). The actual programming is basically just some time I need to spend building increasingly complex things, but I didn't want to waste any time developing on Wordpress, hence my desire to just get *something* deployed, and start building from there. I'll peruse the repo for sure, and I will orient around the urls. That (indicating where I should start looking, in the abstract) is a very useful piece of advice for the way my brain works. :> On Friday, December 26, 2014 9:02:46 PM UTC-6, Kenneth Bolton wrote: > > http://effectivedjango.com/ <== Very helpful! > > Just keep at it. For whatever it is worth, I am largely self taught. When > I started, documentation and "use the source, luke" was most of the help > available. It took me years to start diving into that good stuff. I can > tell you the reason I went with Django over RoR or a PHP framework was the > quality of the documentation and the readability of the Python code. > > The place to start, I think, in reading the Mezzanine code is in the base > urls.py > <https://github.com/stephenmcd/mezzanine/blob/master/mezzanine/urls.py>. > Work your way down the file and understand each line. Follow the patterns > into the apps that make up Mezzanine – e.g. core, generic, blog, and pages > – and read their respective urls.py. > > If it helps, think of Mezzanine as a Django app that has already been > built to eliminate the tedium of building yet another hierarchical page, > gallery, and blogging engine. The deeper your understanding of and comfort > with Django, the better the whole thing will click. An instructive analogy, > for me, is to reading and writing prose. The more prose you read, the > better you get at reading it. Once you have read enough prose, the quality > of your own prose will begin to improve (hopefully) and before long reading > and writing prose becomes second nature. Code – whether Python, Ruby, Java > – needs to be practiced, and reading code is the first step. > > Ultimately, just keep at it. If it interests you and you put in enough > time, things will click. Some people get that click quickly. It took me a > long time – almost 14 years – to transition from beginner reader of code > convinced I had no aptitude for it to the first steps down with writing > code on my own. The best part is that once the dots start to connect, the > world really opens up. Also, the learning NEVER ends! > > best, > ken > > > On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 8:09 PM, J. Paskaruk <[email protected] > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> Thanks for the encouragement. I'm pretty good at expressing myself with >> words (no braggin', as Will Sonnett used to say at 3am, just facts), but >> sometimes that expressive ability makes me come off like an arsehole. Most >> cause I'm kind of an arsehole. But my intentions are very good, for >> whatever that's worth. I read the fab docs yesterday. Anyways, I see the >> value of all these things. Just continuing to hold my face squarely in >> front of this here firehose. >> >> The way I'm looking at the best practices thing is that there are best >> practices for working professionals, and there are best practices for >> students. I know that there are many more days ahead of me, reading docs, >> but at this point I'm flailing just to find the right docs to read (if you >> have any "everyone should read this" links or books, or hell, if someone's >> laid out a curriculum that you think I should follow, I'm all ears...). >> This whole experience has been very instructive, needless to say, and >> that's all I'm after for the moment - grand failures that reveal inner >> workings. In order to fail in a properly grand fashion, I need to have the >> ability to throw a wrench into the gears of the factory, which fortunately >> for us, is perfectly fine to do in circumstances where the entire factory >> can be restored by a keystroke. But the entire system is, of course, >> designed to stop people from doing such foolish things in daily life. Every >> tutorial contains at least a nod, and usually a speech that borders on >> sanctimony, about best security practices. Not that this is not valuable >> knowledge, of course, but security is not your priority if you're trying to >> learn how to code a given functionality. >> >> Anyways, my site is currently laid out with "pure" css, right now I'm >> occupying myself by trying to recreate the same layout leaving bootstrap >> intact. Being that I've done a couple of respectable responsive designs on >> my own, I'm not a big fan of Bootstrap's complexity, but then, I want a >> job. Also, I'm told it's very good at automating form validation, which I'm >> all for avoiding if I can...:> >> >> Anyways, again, I appreciate your help AND doubly appreciate your >> encouragement. Schools and teachers have never worked for me, so learning >> things is always a struggle, and finding people with the right sort of >> patience is a struggle of its own. >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Mezzanine Users" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to [email protected] <javascript:>. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Mezzanine Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
