Learning Django and the Django REST Framework by working through William S. Vincent's Django for Beginners [1], Django for APIs and Django for Professionals was a turning point in my career. I started to take myself seriously as a developer, not just an electrical engineering grad who happened to like coding.
Not SICP as a teen, not the Haskell Book, not The Art of Unix Programming, not A Philosophy of Software Design. Those are all fantastic books, but they were the wrong things to read for someone whose definition of "Keep It Simple, Stupid" was "never build anything at all and stay unemployed". Django got me to shut up and build.
And build I did, and most of it did and does suck, and that's okay. And then I got a job, not doing Django, but using the things I learned from actually building with Django every day. I owe Django a great deal, and I still think of the DRF as my favorite approach to building a "well-tempered", maintainable API, on a deadline.