Plain-English Explanation: Django Girls Tutorial

This repository holds the source material for the Django Girls Tutorial, a free online course that teaches people how to build web applications using Django (a Python framework for web development). If you've ever visited tutorial.djangogirls.org, you were reading the published version of what lives in this repository.

The tutorial itself is written in a simple format called Markdown, which is easy to read and edit even for people without programming experience. The repository uses a service called GitBook to take those files and turn them into a polished, published tutorial that appears on the website. Think of it like storing the raw chapters of a book on GitHub and having GitBook handle the publishing side—layout, formatting, and hosting.

Anyone can contribute to improving the tutorial. If you spot a typo or want to suggest a clearer explanation, you can make a small edit directly through GitHub's website without needing any special tools. For bigger changes—like adding entire new chapters or including images and code examples—contributors download the tutorial to their computer, make edits using a dedicated editor (or even just a text editor), and then submit their work back to the Django Girls team for review. The process is managed through GitHub's standard pull request workflow, which is how teams coordinate changes in an organized way.

The project is completely open and free to use and modify under a Creative Commons license, which means educators, developers, and learners can adapt it for their own workshops and courses. Django Girls uses this tutorial in their own workshops around the world to introduce beginners to web development, and countless others have forked and modified it for local versions in different languages and contexts.