I wrote a book teaching beginner web app development using Django, launching on May 4th (successfully Kickstarted last year.)

Website: http://hellowebapp.com

Highlights:

- Aimed at people who have previous HTML/building websites experience.

- Template-first development: see the web app as a website first, before setting up databases and models.

- Generic “collection of things” tutorial. Readers are encouraged to create something using this rubric that means something to them (a blog, a directory of people, etc.) Adding creativity will make the material stick better.

- Includes Heroku deployment, which was honestly the hardest chapter to write (I ended up creating my own Python package to make it partially easier: https://github.com/hellowebapp/hellowebapp-deploy)

- Additional resources are being added to https://github.com/hellowebapp/hellowebapp

If anyone has ideas of how to reach people who are getting into webapp stuff (HTML/CSS) but haven't been able to cross the threshold to programming a backend, would love to hear them!