The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right

I've been messing with Django for some time, and I've long awaited the release of this book. 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 an excellent books-within-a-book as a reference guide. 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.

This is THE book to get for learning the Django framework. (written by the creators of Django) I am reviewing this from a beginner's perspective.. I loved the structure of the book. The beginning parts give you the basics of all the parts of the framework, without talking about syntactic sugar right away. (IMO a good thing, unlike parts of the Rails book) Later on, it gives you the more advanced features of Django, the generic views, the helper stuff, which abstract away the repetitive things that you might have to do if you only knew the things in the first few chapters. If you read this book sequentially, it's good because the earlier stuff shows you what the later chapters are abstracting away. My expectations coming in were pretty high, given that one of the authors was a journalism major, and I still thought that the writing exceeded my expectations I also liked putting the miscellaneous API details in the back, it's a handy reference. Overall, a great book to learn Django from. Django's online docs are one of the best, but deadtree versions give you a different feel, and this one is definitely worth the money.

I've been using Python since the late 90s and have been using Django since it was first released to the public. I thought I knew how everything fit together in Django, but I was wrong. This book filled in the gaps and gave me a deeper understanding of the Django framework itself as well as the philosophy behind it. The writing style is great and the examples walk you through the framework in a way that gives you a good understanding of how Django works. I wish I would have had this book when I first started looking at Django. I highly recommend this book to Django beginners and experts alike.

A good web site framework makes you more productive, and if you're a geek (admit it, you wouldn't be reading this if you weren't one), more productive == more fun. A good idea without good documentation is nothing more than a hobby project. Django is, most emphatically, *not* a hobby project. Adrian and Jacob's writing is technically accurate while remaining clean and readable. They do far more than simply regurgitate the online docs (which they were major contributors to), they get into the 'why.' They are of that rare breed that can first write the code (and do it well) and then write the docs, and do that well also. One of the criteria I judge technical books on is their examples -- good examples don't simply repeat in code what was given in the previous paragraph, they expand and illuminate the concepts and, at their best, they cause the reader to have small (or large) epiphanies about the subject at hand. In particular, "Chapter 10: Extending the Template Engine" and "Chapter 15: Middleware" caused me to rethink how to handle several knotty problems. The copious examples in the book expertly walk the line between being too simple to be instructive and too complex to digest. Although this is not intended as a book for Python beginners, beginners can learn an lot about good Python programming from it.

As a programmer, every few years something comes along that makes you want to redo everything you've recently been working on--because it's easier, it makes sense, and it's actually fun. Using Django for web development is the difference between using a rusty screwdriver or having five people with new Makita cordless drills. Similar to the www.djangoproject.com site, the book is clearly written with excellent examples. Although I'm glad the book is out, the selfish side of me wishes another year passed before more people were exposed to this framework. This sentiment is echoed by a friend who started a job at a cancer research center 6 months ago. Since his first project finished (done in Django), three departments have now dumped Java frameworks for Django. The productivity difference is incredible--and logical--no hidden "magic"