Django 1.0 Website Development (Paperback)

~ Ayman Hourieh (Author)
Key Phrases: save bookmark, social bookmarking application, bookmark submission form, Enhancing the User Interface, Search Bookmarks, User Networks (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Build powerful web applications, quickly and cleanly, with the Django application framework

• Teaches everything you need to create a complete Web 2.0-style web application with Django 1.0
• Learn rapid development and clean, pragmatic design
• No knowledge of Django required
• Packed with examples and screenshots for better understanding

In Detail

Django is a high-level Python web framework that was developed by a fast-moving online-news operation to meet the stringent twin challenges of newsroom deadlines and the needs of web developers. It is designed to promote rapid development and clean, pragmatic design and lets you build high-performing, elegant web applications rapidly. Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle, making it easier to build high-performance web applications faster, with less code.

This book will show you how to assemble Django's features and take advantage of its power to design, develop, and deploy a fully-featured web site. It will walk you through the creation of an example web application, with lots of code examples.

Specially revised for version 1.0 of Django, the book starts by introducing the main design concepts in Django. Next, it leads you through the process of installing Django on your system. After that, you will start right away on building your social bookmarking application using Django. Various Django 1.0 components and sub-frameworks will be explained during this process, and you will learn about them by example.

In each chapter, you will build one or more of the features that are essential in Web 2.0 applications, like user management, tags, and AJAX. You will also learn about good software development practices, such as keeping your application secure, and automating testing with unit tests. By the end of the book, you will have built a fully functional real-life Web 2.0 application, and learned how to deploy it to a production server.

What you will learn from this book?

• Register your users through a user authentication system and manage them efficiently
• Restrict user access to certain pages and protect against malicious input
• Create tags to allow site visitors to classify, view, and share content easily
• Create your own administration interface for proper monitoring of the web site
• Enhance your user interface with AJAX and add flavors to your web site
• Enable voting and commenting on content, and display popular content to site visitors
• Build user networks; add friend management and invitation features for social networking
• Create unit tests to automate the testing of code

Approach

The simple and clear approach is ideal for beginners to Django. Packed with examples and screenshots, this book will help you learn the features of Django 1.0 and help you build a dynamic website using those features.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for web developers who want to learn to build a complete site with Web 2.0 features, using the power of a proven and popular development system, Django, but do not necessarily want to learn how the complete framework functions in order to do this. Basic knowledge of Python development is required for this book, but no knowledge of Django is expected.

About the Author

Ayman Hourieh

Ayman Hourieh holds a bachelor degree in Computer Science. He joined the engineering team at Google in January 2008. Prior to that, he worked with web application development for more than two years. In addition, he has been contributing to several Open Source projects such as Mozilla Firefox. Ayman also worked as a teaching assistant in Computer Science courses for one year. Even after working with a variety of technologies, Python remains Ayman's favorite programming language. He found Django to be a powerful and flexible Python framework that helps developers to produce high-quality web applications in a short time.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (March 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847196780
• ISBN-13: 978-1847196781
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #86,746 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Beginner's Guide, July 4, 2009

By	D. Gallagher (Cornell University) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is a great introduction to Django. If you follow it step by step, you will understand everything you need to construct simple sites. The absolute beginner will be able to make simple sites by the end of this book.

Instead of just focusing on Django, this book also explains how to integrate AJAX into the Django framework. And since all of the examples are based on a social networking site, it is especially appropriate for those interested in doing social networking with Django.

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic book for people new to Django, October 14, 2009

By	J. A. Griffiths "indiehead" (London, UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

5.0 out of 5 stars A good starter, May 16, 2009

By	C., Hsiao - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

i'm about 1/3 through this book and i must say that the book is very easy to follow.

I'm an intermediate programmer by the way, with some experience in c, php and a bit of python.

If you want to have a good overview ( without too much in depth knowledge ) this is a good book to start with.