Which Version to Use?

When you watch or read tutorials sometimes the version of software is different than the version you might be working with already. With our tutorials, we 100% always recommend you stick with the version in the video otherwise little things will cause big headaches.

For example, urls.py has changed slightly from version to version as seen here so this minor, yet long-term important, change will cause a lot of frustration while learning if you stick with the wrong version.

So...

Once you learn something, applying it to a different version becomes a lot easier after the fact instead of while you're learning. This is not simply my opinion, it comes from working directly with students everywhere.

Documentation to the rescue! The good docs will almost always have a changelog that shows how to migrate to the newest / newer version. Django does. The best docs will also show you how to use the various code you're trying to use.

Tutorials, on the other hand, give you context on how to use the code in the docs. Learning the context is more important than learning the version.

Code is always getting better. Always. The developers behind many of the popular languages/packages decided it's better to have a release schedule than to not have one (see Django's). The version change means long-term improvement for real-world use.

This is both challenging and exciting. It's exciting because that means everything is getting better even if incrementally. Challenging because if you're learning something new, the last thing you should worry about is what the latest version is. What you should worry about is how the language/framework/package works as a whole.