Book review: The Definitive Guide to Django
I've been messing with Django for some time, and I've long awaited the release of APress' The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right. This is one of the few times I've painstakingly gone through all the code samples and replicated as many of the examples as I could. The book's chapters are laid out logically and the material is presented intelligently by the creators of the framework.
The authors don't waste time and energy exhaustingly spewing rhetoric about how Django came to be, how they developed it and what their mindset is/was/will be. They just let you get to work, quickly be productive, and have fun developing cool stuff for the web. Which is the whole point of Django to begin with.
It's not written with a total newbie audience in mind, so some experience with web work, databases and Python programming is helpful, maybe even necessary. But, with some elbow grease, an open mind and a little persistence, you'll catch on. Although the authors are partial to Linux and Mac environments, the book gives more path and settings examples in those OSes, as well as Windows.
However, in criticism a scant few of the examples rely on a slightly older build of the framework, so some of the namespaces might be inconsistent with the book, and code snafus are spotty. I found myself hungry for more screenshots, which is a minor, but still desired shortcoming of the text.
Nonetheless, the book is chock full of little tidbits and tricks to help you write less code that's more reusable. Best practices are enforced as far as maintaining the "MTV" application architecture, including heavy doses of refactoring. As far as topics, Simon Willison's demo of building an intra-site search utility was what I found to be the book's coolest example. Other great chapters are working with non-HTML content, internationalization and working with Django's templates. The appendices are also phenomenal, making for excellent books-within-a-book reference guides.
In future editions of the book I'd hope to see more pragmatic app examples, more APIs and their capabilities cited, more "one-off" utilities built, and perhaps even an app developed consistently across chapters to bring the whole thing together and reinforce the concepts.
This book is without doubt essential reading for getting down with Django.
The authors don't waste time and energy exhaustingly spewing rhetoric about how Django came to be, how they developed it and what their mindset is/was/will be. They just let you get to work, quickly be productive, and have fun developing cool stuff for the web. Which is the whole point of Django to begin with.
It's not written with a total newbie audience in mind, so some experience with web work, databases and Python programming is helpful, maybe even necessary. But, with some elbow grease, an open mind and a little persistence, you'll catch on. Although the authors are partial to Linux and Mac environments, the book gives more path and settings examples in those OSes, as well as Windows.
However, in criticism a scant few of the examples rely on a slightly older build of the framework, so some of the namespaces might be inconsistent with the book, and code snafus are spotty. I found myself hungry for more screenshots, which is a minor, but still desired shortcoming of the text.
Nonetheless, the book is chock full of little tidbits and tricks to help you write less code that's more reusable. Best practices are enforced as far as maintaining the "MTV" application architecture, including heavy doses of refactoring. As far as topics, Simon Willison's demo of building an intra-site search utility was what I found to be the book's coolest example. Other great chapters are working with non-HTML content, internationalization and working with Django's templates. The appendices are also phenomenal, making for excellent books-within-a-book reference guides.
In future editions of the book I'd hope to see more pragmatic app examples, more APIs and their capabilities cited, more "one-off" utilities built, and perhaps even an app developed consistently across chapters to bring the whole thing together and reinforce the concepts.
This book is without doubt essential reading for getting down with Django.
posted by Jason Salas @ 10:49 PM
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