Django
Visual QuickPro Guide
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
DJango is a open source web application framework written in Python. It follows the MVC (model view controller) design pattern; this software design pattern separates business logic from the user interface making it easier to make changes to the logic or interface without affecting the other. Django's primary goal is to ease the creation of complex, database-driven websites. The framework emphasizes reusability and "pluggability" of components, rapid development, and the principle of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself). Python is used throughout.
Django: Visual QuickStart Guide starts at the beginning and moves web designers quickly along the path to developing Python Web applications with Django. After introducing readers the idea of Model/View/Controller applications and why Django is the right choice, the book walks a reader through creating their first Django Web site. It goes on to cover the ultra-cool things that can be done with Django to create robust Model/View/Controller applications.
Customer Reviews
Somewhat useful, but out of date, lots of filler
This may have been great when Django 1.0 was out, but so much has changed, that I can't currently recommend it. If you're new to Django, I suggest you'd get more out of the official Django tutorial than you will from this book. There is some good info in here for beginners (or at least, it was good, when the book was originally published), but there is also a crazy amount of filler.
At the start of almost every chapter, the author has you re-create the project that you re-built and modified during the last chapter, instead of just continuing to use a single project. Was this supposed to be an attempt to get you used to manual migrations? I don't know, but the book would have been 40% shorter if all of this duplicated effort hadn't been included.
Throughout the book, the web admin interface is never enabled (though it is shown commented out in one of the code listings), so every time you're looking at the data in the database, the author has you accessing it via the Django shell command line.
I understand the value of doing things “the hard way” once, before being introduced to helper elements, just so the reader understands how things work at a lower level, but it seems kind of crazy to keep doing it that way and completely ignoring ways to make your development faster, especially in a book that styles itself “QuickPro”.
The book jumps to a couple of new projects at the end, that don't replicate the previous projects, but they only serve as one-off examples of how to do forms or logins. I was disappointed that they weren't presented as new apps to add to our original Django project, so we could see how they integrated. Instead we get a complete standalone login project that logs you in to… nothing. Then, the book ends abruptly, with no wrap-up or suggestions for further learning. Very odd.