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Back-End Development

Back-end development is the process of creating the server-side logic and functionality of a website, which is what powers the website and enables it to function properly. This includes handling user input, processing data, and communicating with the database. Back-end development is typically done using programming languages such as Python, Ruby, and JavaScript, and frameworks such as Django, Ruby on Rails, and Node.js.

Python​

Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language that is widely used for web development, data science, artificial intelligence, and scientific computing. It is known for its simple and easy-to-learn syntax, which makes it an excellent choice for beginners and experienced developers alike.

Python has a large and active community, which has created a wide variety of libraries and frameworks that make it easy to perform complex tasks. Some of the most popular web frameworks include Django, Flask, and Pyramid. These frameworks provide pre-built components and libraries that make it easy to create web applications quickly and efficiently.

Python is also a popular choice for data science and artificial intelligence due to its powerful libraries such as NumPy, Pandas and Scikit-learn for data manipulation, and TensorFlow and PyTorch for machine learning. It also has libraries for visualization like Matplotlib and Seaborn.

Python also supports multiple programming paradigms, such as object-oriented, functional, and procedural programming, making it versatile and adaptable to different types of projects.

In summary, Python is a versatile, powerful and easy-to-learn programming language that is widely used for web development, data science, artificial intelligence and scientific computing. It has a large and active community which has created a wide variety of libraries and frameworks that make it easy to perform complex tasks. It's adaptable to different types of projects and its simple syntax makes it a great choice for beginners and experienced developers alike.

Django and Django Rest Framework​

Django is a high-level web framework for Python that is designed to make it easy to build web applications quickly and efficiently. It follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, which separates the concerns of the application into distinct components. This allows developers to focus on the logic of the application rather than the details of the web development process.

Django comes with a built-in admin interface, which allows developers to easily manage and update the data of their application. It also includes built-in support for authentication, authorization, and security, which helps to keep the application secure and protect against common web attacks.

Django Rest Framework (DRF) is a powerful and flexible toolkit for building Web APIs. It is a third-party package for Django that makes it easy to build, test, and debug RESTful APIs written using the Django framework. It is built on top of the Django framework, and it's specifically designed to work with Django models and views.

DRF provides a simple and consistent interface for interacting with the database and the views, it also supports serialization, pagination, filtering, and authentication and permissions. It also provides a built-in browsable API, which allows developers to easily test and debug their APIs.

Key Concepts To Learn​

Django and Django REST framework (DRF) are powerful tools for building web applications, but they can be complex and difficult to learn for beginners. To be a good developer, it's essential to understand some key concepts and components of Django and DRF.

There are several key concepts to learn when developing with Django and Django REST framework (DRF).

  1. Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern: Django follows the MVC pattern, which separates the concerns of the application into distinct components: Models, Views, and Templates. Understanding how to use each of these components to create a well-structured and organized application is essential.

  2. Object-Relational Mapping (ORM): Django's ORM allows developers to interact with the database using Python code, rather than writing raw SQL queries. Understanding how to create models, perform database migrations, and make queries is essential.

  3. Views: Django views handle the logic and business rules of the application. Understanding how to create views, handle request and response, and redirect the user is important.

  4. Templates: Django templates handle the presentation of the application. Understanding how to create templates, use template tags and filters, and pass data from views to templates is important.

  5. Django REST framework (DRF): DRF is a powerful toolkit for building RESTful APIs. Understanding how to create views, serializers, and authentication/permission classes is essential. Understanding how to use request and response objects, and how to handle pagination, filtering, and ordering is also important.

  6. Authentication and Authorization: Django provides built-in support for authentication and authorization, understanding how to use them and how to implement them in your application is important.

  7. Security: Understanding how to secure your application against common web attacks and vulnerabilities is important. Django provides built-in security features, such as protection against cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection attacks, as well as ways to handle sensitive data, such as passwords and user credentials. It's important to be familiar with these security features and best practices to ensure that your application is as secure as possible.

  8. Python Fundamentals: A strong understanding of core Python concepts such as data types, variables, control flow, functions, and object-oriented programming is essential for working with Django and DRF. Understanding how to use Python's standard library and how to work with different data structures such as lists, dictionaries and sets is also important. Additionally, understanding how to use debugging and testing tools like pdb and unittest is beneficial.

In summary, understanding the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, Django's Object-Relational Mapping (ORM), Views, Templates and Django REST framework (DRF) is important for a beginner to become a good developer. It is also important to understand how to work with database, handle request and response, and how to implement authentication and permission.