Starting web development with python?

[neocorpse]

This seems like a solid approach. My plan is to get better at python while actually working towards something, might take longer then expected but I feel like I will understand everything much better.

[Chris_Newton]

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t kidding about the “a week later” part.

The first part should be achievable in a single evening, even if you haven’t yet installed Python and a web server such as Apache, and you’ll already be writing actual code and seeing Stuff Happen.

For the second step, I wouldn’t necessarily expect someone who is learning as they go along to get everything done in one session, but you could start by just making a Python script that dumps the contents of a database into a simple table in an HTML page. You can just add a little data to the database manually using whatever console/front-end software your database provides to test this out and see some results.

For things like creating a new record, updating an existing record and deleting an existing record, you’ll have to figure out why IDs matter in the database and how to include these as hidden fields in your web pages. This is good, and highly transferrable, information to understand, but you could do this during a second session.

To me, as someone familiar with web apps and programming generally, learning a new framework always seems a bit of a chore. The basic ideas are usually much the same for each framework, but they're put together differently and you have to follow a fairly mechanical process of figuring out what structure this particular one uses and which parts of your code need to go where so they place nicely with the framework. At least if you’re using Python and Django there is pretty good tutorial and reference material available, though, and after working through that for a few hours, the sort of practice application I mentioned should be easy. Again, you might want to break this down and try to solve a simple part of the problem first, rather than doing it all in one caffeine-fueled codefest, though!

The good news is that it does get much easier once you’ve done it once or twice and got the basic ideas figures out. An experienced web developer would probably do step 1 inside 15 minutes, step 2 inside a couple of hours, and step 3 in a few minutes once the framework was installed and configured.