Django 1.0 Website Development [Paperback]

Let me preface this review by saying that I'm a professional software developer. I work for a mid-size communications company, and one of my tasks over the past 6 months has been investigating new web technologies to help us develop more modern, best-practices web applications.

I started messing around with Django around 5 months ago, by reading the official website documentation and the online Django book (which were both great resources), but I felt that what was lacking from my experiences was a complete, best-practices walk through of building a full website with Django. As I'm sure most of you know, the best way to get comfortable with a new technology is to use it to build something. This is when I started checking out other Django books on Amazon and came across this one.

This book walks you through building a complete social bookmarking site (similar to [...]) from scratch. The author does an amazing job of introducing you to Django and starts with the basics, working up to more and more complex things. I was surprised how well this book was written, and how easy it was to understand the code and explanations without much thinking. By Chapter 4 (45 pages in) you've already implemented a full user authentication system and user portal. You're able to display bookmarks, and much more. The author is not long-winded, and his writing style reminds me in many ways of Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan (authors of the infamous book: 'The C Programming Language').

As to what the book covers, it walks you through everything from the installation of Django to depolying Django on production servers once the site has been finished. It does an excellent job of discussing useful deployment techniques including caching, in only a few lines of code. Furthermore, the author will show you how to add ajax effects to your website to increase usability, using the jQuery framework (an incredibly popular and powerful javascript framework). It even covers usage of some jQuery plugins (like live searching of content).

I frequently use this book as a reference guide (the cover is beginning to wear out) as the examples are really easy to navigate, and the descriptions are verbose.

Overall, I'd say this book is a must read for any Django developer who wants to really grasp the inner workings of the Django framework. It's easy to read, very concise, and filled with useful, best-practices information that you will not want to miss.

For a while now I've been itching to try out Django, it's one awesomely powerful framework, simple and elegant. So thanks to a good friend, Ayman Hourieh sent me a copy of his recent book "Django 1.0 Web Site Development" to review and boy is it a cracking read.

Unlike some other books I've read he doesn't try to tackle all the bases at once and then put together the pieces afterwards, he sets out a clearly defined roadmap at the start and builds upon each chapter as you progress; reinforcing what you've learnt with quick review sessions at the end of each chapter.

Starting small he introduces you to the world of Python, it's origins and how & why the Django framework was created. Ayman then runs you through a couple of example lessons to gain your experience with it's fundamentals. This is important as it increases your confidence with the framework and settles you into progressing more, and not pushing you too far too soon. Let's face it with anything new confidence is a big factor and it's important to not try to do too much or embellish too far with details that are little use, and Ayman nails it.

Python is one of those languages, like Ruby or PHP, that doesn't restrict you to a specific o/s and right away he shows you how easy it is to install and setup on Linux / OSX or Windows; you've got to love things like that, good stuff.

Once done we setup Django, create our first "hello world" project and then review what we've learnt before continuing. Next we go ahead and build a simple social bookmarking application (think of a simple Del.icio.us), we learn about Templates and building up our Database Schema; summarising as we progress.

Next up we handle User Registration. Django comes with a set of default packages which each provide a specific form of functionality to your app, authentication and user management is baked in, others like tagging can be installed as required; it's up to you to decide how you use them.

He bases each chapter on real-world processes, securing your app, tagging, expanding the data schema and adding AJAX functionality with the awesomely powerful jQuery framework. Building on social networking concepts he shows you how to add voting, sharing bookmarks between users and allowing those users to comment on each others posts; before you know it you've got a pretty sterling app going.

Next we delve inside Django's built-in administration interface, restricting users, group permissions and crafting the interface more to your application's liking.

We then look at advanced searching and adding RSS news feeds to our application, binding those to our users so each one has their own channel. By using Django's Q objects you can quickly gain a solid understanding of it's Database API and Ayman's examples are pretty easy to follow here.

Once we've built a friendship model and an email system, Ayman shows us how to bake in internationalization. This is not a new concept if you've used other frameworks like Rails or CodeIgniter, but he lays it out so easily that the task of translating the phrases is the only headache you get; and being agile we don't get past deployment without putting together some fixtures and automated tests so we have confidence in what we're giving the public.

All in all, for $39.99 (24 quid), you get an easy to understand roadmap that teaches you a good set of fundamentals and takes you from a basic app to something really powerful. At a stretch you could probably complete the app in a week, after which Ayman gives some decent pointers for how to improve it. Weighing in at 250 pages it's perfectly balanced to give you the proper start in this awesome framework.

Great stuff, well recommended

To cut a long story short, this is the best introductory book I have seen on the Django framework. If you are a Django newbie with some rudimentary background in Python, this is the book for you. The book has a great flow which seamlessly connects the different aspects of the Django framework. This book allows you to get productive really fast. By chapter 5, you will already have known HTML forms and by chapter 6, you will be on your way integrating JQuery with Django.
The one thing that this book has that other books dont is context. The author introduces us to various shortcuts in the framework, but only after showing what the long form is. The other thing that this book has in its favor is the language. The language is clear, simple English and not crammed with acronyms that many other books love to throw around (i.e, you will not need anything other than this book to understand this book).
Kudos Ayman!