Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging Revised ed. Edition, Kindle Edition

First, a little about my background: I've been using Django for approximately 8 months, both professionally and for fun.

This book really blew me away. I learned more new things in this book than I have reading the past 5 or so tech books alone. This book is extremely useful for any developers who would like to be better all around Django programmers, as it provides a solid, proven system for developing, testing, and debugging Django applications.

The rest of my review will be spent breaking this book down for anyone interested.

TARGET AUDIENCE
---------------

The target audience for this book are developers comfortable writing Django websites. This includes proficiency with:

* models
* forms
* views
* templates
* settings (settings.py)
* python modules
* the concept of unit testing
* the concept of 'agile development'

If you are decent at any of the above, or can at least understand all of the terminology, and know WHY things work the way they do, then this book will be extremely useful to you.

If you aren't really sure you know the topics above, consider reading another Django book before this one (but still buy this one).

TOPICS COVERED
--------------

The book covers the following topics in-depth:

* Running tests on Django websites / applications.
* How to write useful doctests.
* How to write useful unit tests.
* Doctest dependence and creation / specification.
* Unicode problems with doctests, and how to fix them.
* Basic, intermediate, and advanced unit testing.
* What to unit test, what not to worry about. (EG: Don't test native parts of Django, it is already tested.)
* Environmental dependence in tests: database dependence, test interdependence, etc.
* How to generate test fixtures.
* How to use test fixtures.
* Testing Django admin applications.
* Testing emails.
* Testing other HTTP methods.
* Testing URL configurations.
* Testing templates with Django's test client, and twil.
* Using nose as a test runner.
* How to understand Django's debug pages.
* How to use PDB to do intensive low-level debugging of running applications.
* How to perform performance / stress tests using siege.
* Fixing multi-threaded coding errors.
* Tracking SQL queries and optimizing SQL requests.
* Using Django Debug Toolbar.
* How to use the Django ticketing system.
* How to deploy using mod_wsgi + apache for fast websites.
* How to log code effectively using the native python logger.
* How to get *real* coverage reports using django-coverage.

OVERALL REVIEW
--------------

This book is by far the best book on agile development with Django that has been written. If it were up to me, I would require every programmer who uses Django to read this book before writing production code. It outlines the best practices for developing with Django (with a strong focus on testing), and WHY they are best practices.

The author is an extremely good technical writer, and her focus and clarity is easily identifiable in the text. She is able to elegantly describe even the most complex thoughts, actions, and results with little reader friction.

If you work with Django (for fun or profit), and haven't read this book, do yourself a favor and buy it. It will make a world of difference in your day-to-day work, and will make future programmers working on your code love you.

It also covers details such as the best way to test models, how to test forms, etc., in a straightforward, easy to understand method.

This is my first foray into kindle ebook. It seems to be such a good idea, but in the end I had to return it for a refund. Not only does it not retain the look and feel of the printed book, the program samples are reduced into nothing but a pile of unformatted letters, literally. For a book on python programming, where indentations are key and critical elements, it is a death nail. I am left wondering if it is just books from this publisher, or is it a more general problem with kindle ebooks. Either way, how can it be, this day and age!!

Don't let the Django 1.1 label on the cover fool you, this is still the best book available on testing Django applications.

Once again I felt completely absorbed by the style chosen for this Packt Publishing book, as it makes use of a complete application to reinforce all of the topics covered. You start with a brief explanation of the benefits of testing your code and immediately start building a market research application from scratch.

Every chapter is built on the previous one, covering topics such as doctests, unittests, and adding coverage information and reports via Ned Batchelder's coverage script. You also learn about using Django's ''django.test.Client module and Twill to perform web testing and make sure that what your users see in their web browser is valid content and what they expected.

I liked the fact that several chapters were dedicated to showing you how to properly debug, log, and understand the information collected by these methods. Also how to fix any issues that may come up during the development phase, as well as write tests to catch them! I have definitely learned several new ways to look at debug information that I will make sure to add to my arsenal. Some of the tools you'll learn include the awesome Django Debug Toolbar (I wrote about it here) and even the Python debugger (pdb), so if you've never heard of either one or need a refresher, you'll enjoy the last chapters of this book.

By the time you're done reading this book, you'll have a complete market researching tool, including some Fancy Nancy charts generated by pygooglechart or matplotlib AND instructions on how to deploy it in a production environment and perform some load tests using siege!

Overall, this book offers good quality screenshots, clear and concise directions and working source code to follow along! I recommend it for anyone who's doing Django development out there and would like to improve the quality of their applications by adding (more) tests!