What is the best practice to learn Django 1.5?

Hi all,

I am very new to the world of Django and I have a couple questions regarding "how to learn it?":

My background is .NET development, mostly developing business logic tiers. I am very fluent with OOP, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript and have an entry-level knowledge of Python. Still, I have no knowledge of MVC (or MVT in this case) nor Django, nor command-line in *nix systems. I am in need to build quickly several web apps and due to the productivity gain in using Python rather than C# / Java, I naturally took a look at Django. I would like to thouroughly learn the framework and be able to bend it to my will as I think I'm in here for the long haul (kinda fed up with the Microsoft stack for development).

I have a need to do things like provide a web-based interface where users can find each other with criteria such as the geographical distance between them, upload images and edit them online, provide natural language search capabilities, etc... (just to highlight that I need to get to the level of knowing more than building a basic polls app or a simple blog).

As I understand, the entry point to learn Django is by completing the tutorial. What then? What would you recommend? As I've seen, most of the resources I can find online are outdated and target 1.4, would I still be able to learn from those and not getting frustrated? Also, I'm working on OS X and I have practically no knowledge of the command line. I glanced a little at how to deploy a Django site to production and quickly got lost... virtualenv, git, etc... No knowledge of that and looks a bit scary for a guy used to deploy an app by copying the compiled build using FTP.

So I'm asking you, experts... ...if you had to learn Django today, with no prior knowledge of previous versions, what would be your learning path?

Thank you for your time and looking forward to join what seems like a really cool community!

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