Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Django in 24 Hours

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

 

 

I have this book and have read most of it, and I think the 1 star reviews here are overly critical and not really deserved.

Yes, the book has some mistakes in it, but most computer books do. I think this book gives you enough instruction that if a code snippet does have an error in it, you can easily identify what it is and fix it yourself. Also, most code snippets are listed more than once, and if I remember correctly, errors present in one code snippet were not present in the others.

I originally learned Django from the Django project's website, but it lacks in a lot of areas. Some features of the framework are covered really well, and others aren't.

When The Django Book came out, I bought it, read it, and gave it a really good review, but the truth is that is suffers from the same lack of consistent focus that the Django website does; some things are covered well and others are lightly touched upon.

I think that is where this book comes in. For me anyway, it filled in some of the missing pieces and clarified some aspects of Django that had been a bit hazy for me before.

None of the other documentation or currently published books provide you with a complete view of Django, and neither does this one. It does, however, provide pieces to the puzzle that the other documentation doesn't. Therefore, I would not write it off as some reviewers have. It does provide value.

First off, there are a number of code errors in this book. Look at some other reviews of Sam's 24 Hours or 24 Days books and you will find that this is common. Apparently one of the reasons that these books are so inexpensive is that the publisher doesn't spend money on technical reviews. I knew that when I got this book so was not disappointed. I have just enough coding experience that I am able to catch obvious mistakes and not get bogged down by the sample code. I can see why someone who is less experienced might find the book unacceptable. To be fair, the book description does mention that it is for people with some Python background, who should be able to spot mistakes in the text.

On the plus side this book actually does a good job of offering Django basics in a logical and straightforward manner. It is a well thought out and paced tutorial and currently the only one available.

I find the Definitive Guide to be more of a reference book than a training one. If you are already an experienced programmer then skip the Sam's volume. If, like me, you have some background but need a step-by-step primer then this book is pretty good. The not yet released Django Projects book might be better but this is what's here now and it has given me enough of a background that I can understand the more advanced material of the Definitive Guide to Django.

This is indeed a good beginner Django book and no doubt will teach you Django in the short 24 hours. However do note that you will not be an expert in Django, but enough to get started and get things going. The real stuff in the online reference anyway. :-)

I did find the chapter on Model lacking and seems incomplete -- hence the 4 stars. But this could be because Django API is still growing, as reflected by the online API.

In short this book delivers the promise of learning Django in 24 hours.

For a "how to" book this title is filled with errors. Examples are incorrect, parameters are misspelled and the instructions are not correct for the current stable release of Django (1.0.3).

Complete waste of money. Perhaps back in 2008 when it was written it was better, but still there were errors that can't be explained by the version alone.

Skip this one.

I would have given this book 4 stars if there had only been one or two errors. However, there are so many errors that it breaks your concentration on learning the Django framework. There are so many errors that I had to dock it 2 stars!

If you don't mind the examples being broken in just about every chapter, this book is worth reading.

I give this book a 3. I think the way it is presented and the pace is good. However I think a lot of the errors go beyond just minor typos and cause much confusion and waste of time. On the bright side, figuring out why the code doesn't work and finding the errors in the book was also very instructive and showed to me that Djangos error system is very good.

I would like to find a book that would let you display images in a Django app with the development server, out of the box. Does anyone know how to do it?

Bought this book hoping to get a good introduction to Django. I've used the Sam's Teach Yourself series before for C++. That book was great. This one, however, is nearly unusable as a tutorial. This book is typo-laden. Code examples frequently don't work. Examples will be inconsistent, something we wrote on page x will reappear on page y but suddenly variables are differently named, lines of code are removed, etc - this sort of clumsy, unscholarly crap.

Worse than the errors, there are 'Try it Yourself' sections that basically encourage 'yak shaving'. The author uses MySQL in the examples for some unknown reason; as a result of this, the reader is encouraged to do this too. In order to use MySQL, guess what? A third party database connector is required, but don't try installing that with a 64-bit version of Python because it won't work. This sort of crap. The author completely neglects to mention that SQLite is included in the python/django package and supports it natively. Armed with this knowledge alone, the reader can skip many exercises that are MySQL specific.

tl;dr
DO NOT.

As the other reviews said, this book would be fine, but there are typos (bugs) on nearly every page - makes it really frustrating and confusing when your code is not working. In my opinion, totally unacceptable!

This book has the most errors of any tech book I've ever read. It seems to average about an error a page and the errors cover a wide gamut of things. For example, one page describing how to make a template has an HTML snippet that says 'bgcolor="aabbcc"' when in fact it needs to be 'bgcolor="#aabbcc"', a basic HTML issue. Elsewhere it describes how to get your data models to appear in the admin interface. He suggests adding a "myClassAdmin" class to your "myClass.py" file but that didn't work for me. Fortunately I had another example (from another book) to draw from and that suggested making a completely new file "admin.py" in putting different stuff in there. Either he's using an older version of Django or he majorly screwed up.

Anyway... I find I am still able to make headway despite these errors for 2 key reasons
a) most of the errors are easy to fix if you go snooping on the web and are at least a little familiar with what's going on. (In some sense fixing these errors is like an extra set of reader exercises.)
b) the book actually does layout the process in a very nice way.

More on (b) above... some books I've read take you from crawling to running with everything templates and then repeat on other aspects of Django. This book instead lets you crawl for a while before showing you the walking short cut and that helps! Related, this book starts with only the core/basic modules, while others I've read jump immediately into some modules to make your life easy, but this approach leaves me with a feeling that there's more "magic" to django than the more basic approach followed here. For example, he goes through the first 6 chapters before he starts using templates, he instead puts all the normal template code in the view. So you learn a lot about the "model" and the "view" part all by themselves instead of learning all 3 parts simultaneously.

So... I wish they'd discount the book because of these errors. But it's good. Find it in a library if you can or maybe used to get that discount, but if you can tolerate those errors it's a good intro to Django.

I'm an expert PHP programmer and have worked quite a lot with the CakePHP MVC framework, so going into this book I was already familiar with how web frameworks generally operated. That said, I don't know if I would have survived learning Django with this book if I had started from scratch.

The book is *almost* correct. The problem is, if you've ever read a tutorial-style programming book, *almost* correct is nowhere near good enough. Even through the first few chapters, I've had to consult the official Django site multiple times to identify how to fix the author's code mistakes. Several of the examples, unedited, will not even get through Django's internal validation. There are various issues with the writing as well; listings of files will be incomplete at times, requiring you to go back to identify what parts are missing before your example site will run correctly.

I can only conclude that there was zero editing involved in this book. The least the author could have done was to have someone simply go through the book, type out the examples as written, and simply *made sure they worked*. Alas, they must have been rushed or something.

There is good stuff here as well, don't get me wrong; if this book were edited, it would be a pretty decent and quick overview of the Django framework. Unfortunately, fixing the errors alone may increase this read beyond the 24 hours promised. Developers wanting to learn Django may be better off with the official Django Book, which is available in both print and free online.