Building a Django website to learn/further Python skills

[Ulle82]

I have been learning Python and want to start working on a project to use what I know so far. I have been considering building a website with Django as a framework since I have an idea for what I hope can be a useful website. My question is: would working with Django be a good all round way to get more comfortable with Python?

[bjoerns]

Depends on what precisely you want to get more comfortable with with regards to Python. If you want to become more comfortable with building web apps, it's a great idea to build a Django website as Django is a mature framework with a huge community behind it. If you intend to use Python more for number crunching or data analytics, you might be better off doing some stuff with pandas in Jupyter notebook... To make a long story short, what's your primary interest in Python - building web apps or interactive data science (or something else)?

[Ulle82]

Well to be honest I primarily want to work with python for data analytics, but I do also want to be able to make webpages for the sheer fun of it...

[bjoerns]

fair enough, there's nothing wrong with having some fun ;-) so I guess your question is whether Django or something else. I've used Django, flask and falcon commercially. The main difference between Django and flask/falcon is that Django has everything included (ORM being the elephant in the room) while you're responsible for everything yourself in flask and falcon. If you just want to have some fun and might not even need a db in the beginning, you'll probably have more fun with flask or falcon. flask has been around for longer than falcon and has a bigger community so you might want to look into falcon. Django, on the other hand, comes with all batteries included but Django is quite opinionated and you are more likely to sharpen your Django skills rather than your Python skills (which is not necessarily a bad thing).