Customer Reviews

Python Web Development with Django

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

We are a Python shop at work and have recently started developing in Django. So I picked this book up as a total beginner to Django, but an experienced Python programmer. I feel that the book would be more or less the same even for someone totally new to Python, because Django is definitely a different kind of beast.

Overall, this book was okay to good. I would give it 3.5 stars if I could. It is definitely targeted at beginners to Django (and possibly Python). As a Django beginner, I first ran through the tutorial on the Django website, because it is very thorough and good. I definitely recommend that as a starting place regardless of which book you end up buying. Then I cracked open this book. The first chapter is a 50-page introduction to Python, so I skipped that. Chapter 2 is a tutorial in which you build a simple blog. So by the time I had finished that chapter, I had built two different Django sites but not really read anything about the language or framework or theory thereof. I think this is a good thing, and this chapter is well-placed. Chapter 3 introduces Django. It covers dynamic web sites, communication, data storage, presentation, separating the layers (MVC), general django architecture, and "core philosophies of Django". It is a decent introduction, though I read through it quickly so I could get to the next three chapters.

The next three chapters make up the Django in Depth section and are the bread-and-butter of the book. The first chapter covers models, the second URLs/HTTP/views, and the third templates and form processing. For me, these were the chapters I was most looking forward to, where I would learn everything I needed to know to get started really understanding. And they let me down a bit. Each one was good in what it covered, but the problem was that it left out quite a bit. The part on the models themselves was pretty good and covered the necessities. But the part on querying was a little sparse. They left much for the reader to go to the documentation and find out. (But what's the point of the book, then?) I did think it was nice that they mentioned fixtures, as I had trouble finding that information online when I needed to set one up for work. The chapter on views was decent, but seemed to leave out too much detail. The section covering views specifically was short. Finally, the template/forms chapter again left the reader to find out critical details in the online documentation. First, the template section was short. Second, the forms section seemed long enough, but I just found that it wasn't that helpful when I was really creating forms for work.

The next four chapters are tutorials in which you build various applications. I haven't gone through these yet, but they look pretty good. I think Django is one of those things that is best learned in a very hands-on fashion. Perhaps some of the weaknesses of the previous three chapters are made up for here; but I doubt it, and if so feel that information should have still been included in the earlier chapters. (The book is fairly slim and could definitely be expanded.) Chapter 11 covers advanced Django programming, including customizing the admin, using syndication, generating downloadable files, enhancing Django's ORM with custom managers, and extending the template system. The chapter seems decent enough, although I haven't had to do any of these things yet. Likewise, with Chapter 12 covering advanced Django deployment, I haven't had to deploy anything yet so I only know that the chapter seems to cover some useful information.

I've read four books on Django now, as well as the documentation on the Django website. Some of the information in the other books is now outdated since Django 1.0 was released, but this book does not suffer from that problem.

I liked this book because it was short and to the point, is up-to-date, and clarified some of the documentation on the Django website.

If you only want to buy one book on Django, this would be the best one to get; in my opinion.

Coming from a PHP background, I decided to take on a more serious development language for my future web projects. I picked Python and Django.

This book covers basic Python first. So it's not necessary to learn Python from a dedicated book. The primer in this book is adequate. And the online documentation is great to fill in the spaces as needed.

The thing I like most about the book is that it covers a tremendous amount of ground. The example projects use advanced functions and structures that other books avoid, and the coding structures can be complex and deep. DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is a core philosophy in Python and in Django. These authors do a great job keeping the code DRY. And that often means building elegant, but hard to understand code.

The thing I don't like about the book is related to what I think makes it so good. It's damn complex at times.

Often while trying to work through some code examples and reproduce the results, I find that I don't understand the structure of something. I'll end up spending 10 minutes or a few hours consulting the online docs learning the new functions and trying to understand some structure that is outlined in the book.

The book isn't very long for all the content that's packed inside. And that's mostly due to the fact that the authors have left out explanations for a lot of what is going on behind the scenes in their more complex bits of code.

Django is a pretty deeply nested framework (in my limited experience). When you call on an object, it might be a subclass of a subclass of another subclass that inherited from two other classes, one of which is a subclass of another. So, to really understand what an object is like can be complicated. The same goes for functions.

Django is similar in the way an application uses a lot of different files through multiple imports to pull together even the simplest of views.

If you are coming from working with Python or C or Perl or something else where you spend a lot of time on the command line and OOP is second nature to you, this book will probably be easy to work through. If you are just using PHP or ASP, get ready for a major learning curve. And maybe just consider looking at the other Django books instead.

One other benefit to this book over others is that it's relatively new and incorporates some of the bigger changes that were made in version 1.0 of Django. This can save you some time trying to figure out why the code examples don't work if you use the older books with the newer release of Django.

This is my second Django book (comments on the first one below). I highly recommend it for those like myself who are fairly new to Python and Django.

Things I like about this book:

1) Unlike other Django books currently available, the example applications use the latest version of Django (as of Dec 2008)

2) The authors provide downloadable zip files of all the sample apps at [...]

3) The book provides a compact summary of Python and Django and then illustrates by example via several sample applications. The initial blog application is a very quick and easy way to see Django in action.

When trying the Gallery app, be sure to review Appendix B and figure out how to make Apache serve up your static media files.

Before reading this book, I recommend working your way through the official Django tutorial here: [...]

Btw, the first book I read was Practical Django Projects by James Bennett. While this book could so easily have been a 5 star book for me, it suffered from two major flaws: 1) It used an old version of Django in all the examples so it was tough to follow along; 2) There were (as of Dec 2008) no downloads available for the sample code. So, again, it took way to long to implement the sample apps.

Django rocks!

I looked at all the available Django 1.0 books and this one appeared the best. I've read about half of it now and it's really well written and informative. The method is very good for intermediate developers from other languages. If you're a total beginner to web development, you might want to get an HTML/CSS book and read that first. In this book, there are basic presumptions (i.e. that 404 is the error code for URL not found) that are easy for those who know and not intuitive for those who don't.

With that said, Django is a fantastic framework for the beginner even though it's more complex.

Frameworks and patterns are really becoming strong fixtures of the web development community. They are giving developers the ability to do more and do it faster. Django is a great example of a framework that is enabling developers to developer faster. I just a few lines of code you can create a blog (Chapter 2), a photo gallery (Chapter 7) or a content management system (Chapter 8). Where Django is a quick way to learn Python and create great applications, Python Web Development with Django (the book) is a great way to learn Django.

The first chapter is a great quickie on what Python is and about the parts of Python. It's a quick explanation of variables, tuples, lists, and more. The subsequent chapters walk you through all the inner workings of Django.

Jeff Forcier, Paul Bissex, and Wesley Chun really give you a great book, and plenty of great examples of what Django can do. In detail you are shown, explained what each part of Django you are working with is for, and the secrets to it's inner part. Often you are given options and directions on how to expand and change your application.

Probably the sweetest parts of this book is the appendix on Google App Engine. GAE allows the use of Django, and this appendix explains what it takes to add that to the mix so your app can move seamlessly into the cloud with Google App Engine.

I bought this book after reading the table of contents and deciding it was a pretty comprehensive overview. With a bit more experience with Django, I think I made a mistake. With all due respect to the authors (including Wesley Chun, author of the fabulous "Core Python Programming"), I think I would have been better off with the tutorial available on the main Django site and "The Definitive Guide to Django."

The "Definitive Guide" was co-authored by one of the creators of Django, and goes into a lot more depth. I've already ordered it and expect to receive it soon.

If you just want to get started with Django quickly, follow the tutorial on the Django home page. It's wonderful and gives you a good understanding of what you're doing as you follow along. That might be enough for most people. This book is kind of like the tutorial, except it has a few different sample projects for you to follow along with. If that's all you want then I recommend this book.

However, if you want to learn about Django, and have something you can read away from the computer to really understand the system and actually know what's going on, then I recommend checking out the table of contents of "The Definitive Guide to Django" and considering that instead.

So, buy this book if you want to "learn by example," and the definitive guide if you want to understand Django well enough to make full use of its power and possibly even make your own changes to the code.

Update: If I could, I'd change my review to four stars. It's a very good book, and is possibly the most up-to-date book (as far as Django 1.0 support). The book's target audience will find this book extremely useful, and it's easy to follow. It's not the fault of the authors that I didn't do enough research before I bought this book instead of a more in-depth treatment of Django.

I probably would give the content of the book 4 stars.

However, the book claims in the preface that "monospacing [is used] to delineate Python and command line material such as variable names or commands", but the Kindle edition (on both a Kindle DX and Kindle for PC) renders all code in a variable-width font. This makes it difficult to differentiate between multiple underscores (which are viewed as a continuous line) as well as the difference between consecutive single quotes '' and double quotes ", or sections of text where the keywords should be in a different font (e.g., one section reads "and and or or" in the same font, instead of differentiating the python keywords "and"/"or" from the rest of the text).

I also think for an e-book that contains code-examples that you should be able to copy and paste (from Kindle for PC). I can see not being able to copy and paste entire pages / sections of the book for copyright reasons, but minimal copy/paste of at least of lines of code would be convenient.

If the Kindle edition was significantly discounted, I could neglect these flaws, but right now the Kindle edition ($24.22) is nearly identical in price to the printed edition ($26.91 new at Amazon, $18.37(+$3.99 shipping) new from other sellers).

I've found this book to be a very good source of information both for programmers with some Django experience as well as for those who are Django beginners. In the spirit of Django, this book includes in addition to Django specific stuff some good advice for web development in general.
The examples are very well documented and unlike some other programming books the explanations are thorough and easy to understand.
There is also an introduction to Python which I was happy I didn't skip although I'm not a Python novice since it is so well written.
All in all, if you are a Django novice or you already have some experience with Django you'll find this well written book very useful.

As a pretty experienced web programmer but new to django, I found this book very helpful. The book covers all important features of the framework that a new user should be aware of. The example applications have forced the authors to include detailed solution for technical problems such as image treatment, cron jobs and so forth, that were very valuable to me. Furthermore, I really enjoyed the wealth of informations that are more about the environment of django than the technical intricacies. For example: useful editors, version tracking, where to find good django applications, fellow django programmers and so forth. This is very useful and saved me a lot of time surfing.

Finally, at the time of this writing, this is the only paper book handling most of the features of Django 1.0. Other books describe version 0.96 or earlier, while a lot of useful features appeared only in 1.0. If as me, you enjoy being able to read your book when far from your computer, this book is the one to go. If not, maybe there are some other good electronic options.

As a final remark : I am pretty sure this is not a book for beginning web programmers. The introduction to the subject is really too short.