Yo, I am self-taught too! Self-taught gang 👊 Harvard CS50x >> CS50p >> CS50w + Django official docs >> Django REST official docs First half of CS50x is a quick runthrough on how computers work (memory management etc). Second half is how the web works. David Malan is a goated instructor CS50p is for pure industry Python (pythonic way). Here I learned about tools like Black for opinionated formatter, Isort for import sorter, Mypy for type checking, Pytest for testing framework. Recently also discovered Ruff, superfast python linter written in Rust. CS50w is for pure Django. This course is project based, starting with a frontend for search engine, to full stack wiki, ecommerce, mail, then social network. The beauty about Django REST is that you're not building full stack projects anymore, your building APIs. Thus you can completely separate backend (like Django REST + Postgres) from the frontend (like Typescript + React and more recently HTMX). For additional cs theory, there is: teachyourselfcs.com For dsa: Berkeley cs61b For more python: YT coreyschafer, arjancodes, realpython website For more django: MDN docs about Django If you're struggling about Django, it's usually not because of Django. Most prolly, it could either be lack of Python understanding since Django is written in Python, or lack of web understanding, since Django is a framework to simplify building MVCs for the web. Once you get a bit comfortable with the framework, try aiming for jobs that uses Django or Django REST as their main stack -- goal here is to get involved or have exposure on a large enough project in a professional setting where there are users (and consequences for design decisions) -- doesnt have to be a full time job, could also be opensource, or internships, volunteer work, etc. Hopefully, praying 🤞, copium, by this point in time market has settled down. More on reddit.com

Try book Django by Example 5 🙂 More on reddit.com

I think the tutorial in the official documentation is fine, then there is the Django girls page and the Django Two Scoops book. Once you can create apps and views, I recommend learning specific things (in order): How to get body content and headers in views JSON: Parse content and use JsonResponse render shortcut and templates (context, block, if, for loop) Models: Fields (DateTime -> ForeignKey -> ImageField) Models: Migration commands Models: ModelAdmin (list_display) and TabularInline Forms (Basic usage) File Storage Class Based Views (fbvs vs cbvs) User: Authentication (auth urls and modify default templates) User: Custom Authentication views (authenticate, login, logout) User: Set permissions and groups User: Profile Model vs AbstractUser Signals How to send emails Tests (learn about UnitTest framework) Django Rest Framework (see documentation and Medium posts) DRF: APIView DRF: Serializer and ModelSerializer DRF: Generic views DRF: Pagination DRF: Session/Token Authenticantion and permissions DRF: Custom Auhentication DRF: Tests (APIClient) OAuth (OAuth Toolkit) Celery (create tasks and periodic tasks) (good to know) Django Channels (optional) Django Ninja Upload to production (run as a service, use Apache or NGINX, WhiteNoise, Docker) More on reddit.com

The docs are a great start! A complex application is really just a bunch of smaller logical steps built out over time. More on reddit.com