I've already put about 10x the effort (based on character count) into answering the question than the person put into asking it. I wasn't actually attempting t

I've already put about 10x the effort (based on character count) into answering the question than the person put into asking it. I wasn't actually attempting to cover all the bases; that'd be a few books and blog articles. If the goal is to learn Django, then the basic tutorial is a great place to start, especially for a Rails engineer. If the goal is to build something from scratch in 2017, Django is probably not good choice for someone that's already a Rails expert. Django would be a great way to set up an admin interface and rapidly get a CRUD interface going for an app of 20+ inter-related tables going. But the OP is already a Rails engineer, and in the modern world they're not going to be gaining much. Django is indeed a nice way to make REST backends, but so is Rails. If the idea is to learn something new for an existing Rails engineer, then single page apps are a good choice or some other way to make backends (such as Flask) would be a superior investment of time.