I have always had a problem with django documentation. It's bad. I struggled for a long time with django figuring out what I could do on my own, but the problem isn't simply on the community size, or the number of books, it's also the type of people involved. There's a number of people whom don't want to see it change/grow and that's where I found it frustrating. I don't think you can expect more books to be written about it as a result because many want to keep it niche. It's a great framework otherwise and the changes made in the 1.0 release were awesome. Django is great b/c it allows for full leverage of python. The patch to python only made it that much better too. Django doesn't bake everything in so it's super simplistic in nature. However, I'm now a rails coder and I find scaffolding dumb so I'll switch to merb soon.Working outside in is for the birds, but where the jobs are and better books.
Last point, documentation in my mind winds the race... but community is just as important. The kinda of people you attract etc.. Maybe django will get better in the future and not everything in everybook and documentation will explicitly assume you to be an expert.
My first Django project was a "yet another blog in Django" type of site. This is how it worked:
1-day to do the html(very little html knowledge)
1-day to learn css and do it( i had no css or web design experience)
2-days slacking off
1.5 days reading documentation and writing code as i go along
0.5 days finishing the code and inserting the django template tags in to the html, also seting up the admin site and then killing off the project as a good experience.
As you might guess, i had no other web experience, except some simple html, i found the django docs to be extremely to the point and useful. I also had a problem with setting up django, and people on irc helped with that too.
Don't correlate my frustration with not being able to do something or anything in django. That wasn't the case, not what I meant. I'm glad you were able to make a shitty blog, I'm sure you're satisfied with yourself.
Its not only shitty, its ugly too, thats to be expected from a noob :D
I guess i didn't express my point very well, the idea was that i used the docs and found them very useful, and i was able to do something that i was unable to do if i hadn't. Maybe you could say specifically what you don't like about the docs, here is what i liked:
-there was a good tutorial, that skipped some details, and let me get a general feel of how things work.
-the rest of the docs are divided in to sections and finding things was easy, it was pretty well organized.
-There were notes and backward compatibility warnings, that helped me avoid some headaches.
Well, i don't like the green colorscheme, but other that that i had no headache with it. Maybe if i went on to make something more complicated?
Last point, documentation in my mind winds the race... but community is just as important. The kinda of people you attract etc.. Maybe django will get better in the future and not everything in everybook and documentation will explicitly assume you to be an expert.