Here is, yet another, 5-star review.
Summary:
* Better beginner resource than official docs and other books
* Up-to-date (mine was printed on the same day that I ordered the book)
* Quick read (went through it in just a few days)
The Full Review:
When I first started to play around w/ python I remember setting up an API by following DRF's quickstart. It worked. I set an API up but I couldn't do anything w/ it. I didn't understand what was going on or what had happened behind the scenes to get this app up and running. Going through the rest of the official documentation, I realized that it's meant for people who are comfortable w/ Python and are VERY comfortable w/ Django. But if you haven't had a chance to build several production projects where you've installed and successfully configured 3rd party apps, the official tutorial can be hard to follow.
I've since had the opp to play around w/ Django a bit. I've built a few real-life apps w/ it. About a month ago I reached a pt where I needed to implement an API for one such project. I revisited the official tutorial but while I understood a lot more this time, I still felt somewhat lost.
I decided to follow an e-book that I got a few months back as part of an e-book bundle purchase I made. Everything was going great until chapter 2 when the code presented didn't work. I found that the number one complain for that book was errors in code. No good.
Searching for a DRF-specific book, I this book. I have Vincent's "Django for Beginners" book and I've found it to be the best resource for DJango by far. Knowing that I liked his way of teaching and his way of writing, I went for this book instantly. Didn't even bother to read the reviews.
The first thing to note about this book is that it is up-to-date. How new and fresh is the information in the book? The bottom part of the very last page has the print date. Mine was printed the very same day I purchased it. EVERY piece of software referenced matched the actual latest version of said software/add-on. This alone, is reason enough to purchase this book over any other.
William takes time to explain how REST works. He provides details for how requests and tokens and codes are sent back and forth from client to server. Every piece of code works and the explanation of said code is very easy to understand.
This is a quick read. Should be doable in a weekend if you've got nothing else going on. You'll be up and running a real API in no time. Better yet, you will be at a point where you can jump over to the official DRF docs. My next steps will definitely be to get a better handle on the 3rd party software used in the book (swagger, rest_auth, allauth, etc). Again, this book sets you up so that you can use all of these packages' official docs as reference... as they were intended to be used.
Buy this book if you are new to APIs, have been developing Django apps for less than a yr, or if you've set up DRF-based APIs using the official docs but still not quite sure how/why things work.
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![Django for APIs: Build web APIs with Python and Django (Welcome to Django Book 2) by [William S Vincent]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31jgj93udRL._SY346_.jpg)
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Should have been an appendix... not a separate book
Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2020
I bought and completed all three books hoping that the API coverage would be the meatiest. I was sorely dissapointed. After reading this book and completing the exercises, it could have been done in twenty or so pages of single spaced print. Much of this book is re-hashing what has been covered by the two previous books. While I don't mind the rehash and repetition (think of the Hard Way books by Zed Shaw) , that left very little instruction for the price of admission. I completed this book in one day. If nothing else, I would have loved more thorough explanations, different examples, and a lot more depth on what was covered. What this book could have really used was some real world examples of what some big sites are doing with API's, how to access them, and how to build some of that functionality. However, what this book did, was to go back to the basic blog app that ever django book mentions and write a very simple API for it. It also had an authentication/authorization section that was just starting to get interesting when the book concluded.The other books are a bit overpriced and watered down, but useful. This book is a pamphlet feeding off goodwill from the prior books and author's name.
Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2020
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