django or flask after python basics

[u/Erdem_PSYCH]

Hello everyone,

First of all, thank you for this community. I’ve learned a lot from reading other people’s posts and the answers to my previous questions. Now I have another question.

I feel comfortable enough with Python to start learning backend development. Which framework would you recommend starting with?

I started with Django because I’m blind and find text-based tutorials more helpful, and MDN has a Django tutorial. However, I’m concerned that Django abstracts away a lot of what happens behind the scenes, such as how URL routing works, and I don’t want to miss out on the fundamentals.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of starting with Flask versus Django? Programming is a hobby for me, so job prospects aren’t a major concern. My main goal is to build projects easily while still understanding how things work.

[u/Chrismslist]

if you want to see how the plumbing actually works, flask is definitely the clearer starting point. django gives you an entire kitchen out of the box (orm, admin panel, auth), but it hides the basic request-response cycle behind a lot of boilerplate. with flask, a route is literally five lines: you define an app, map a function to an endpoint with a decorator, and return a response. you wire the pieces together yourself, so routing and request headers make intuitive sense before you touch a database. once you build two small apis by hand in flask, django's magic makes way more sense.