Practical Django Projects (Pratical Projects)

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What you’ll learn

Capitalize upon Django’s well–defined framework architecture to build web applications faster than ever before.
Learn by doing by working through the creation of three real–world projects, including a content management system, blog, and social networking site.
Build user–friendly web sites with well–structured URLs, session tracking, and syndication options.
Let Django handle tedious tasks such as database interaction while you focus on building compelling applications.

Who is this book for?

Web developers seeking to use the powerful Django framework to build powerful web sites.

Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...

3 out of 5 stars

Wait for the next edition of this book August 11, 2008
11 out of 12 found this review helpful

This book is a solid, practically-oriented introduction to Django, but be warned: the code in the book fails with Django 1.0. This is an important caveat because you cannot progress through the exercises unless you know the gotchas and how to modify the code accordingly. Some of the incompatibilities are quite major.

I found that the book pitches a bit low for an experienced developers and it's thin on discussion of the meat of what's going on under the hood. A minor issue with the book is the author's insistence on "admonishing" you literally every second page. You see, calling things "admonitions" one of the secret signs that Python nerds use to show that they're part of that very special little gang of elite hardcore "Pythonistas". For the rest of us, it's just grating (or maybe I'm just not dope enough to be a Pythonista, yo. Y'know what I'm saying, bro? Word.)

Issues aside, I do like its very hands-on approach and I'm betting that the next edition will be a 4.5 star book.

5 out of 5 stars

Ars Technica review of Practical Django Projects July 11, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

The final, and best, section of this book covers a few topics that have personally revolutionized my understanding and how I think about developing my Django applications. James goes to great lengths to explain the philosophy behind Django's concept of reusable applications.

The idea here is that one should strive to develop small, tightly-focused, and loosely coupled applications (or modules) that can be plugged into any application to add instant functionality. In fact, a large portion of what makes Django such an attractive framework--it's auto-generated admin interface, and copious add-on library--are developed in this exact same fashion. It's one of the reason's Django is so powerful and easy to adopt.

With few Django books on the market at this point, I would recommend Practical Django Projects to anyone who has at least cursory experience with web development or web frameworks. By going through the two substantial projects in this book, a competent developer can hone their Django skills to a level that some have reached only after months or years. This book is short for the amount of useful information it will impart on you; at a thin 256 pages, you'll be speeding through chapters at a nice brisk pace that satisfied my scatterbrained personality.

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3 out of 5 stars

It's practically a book August 18, 2008
5 out of 16 found this review helpful

Where's the chapter on deployment? You, know, that silly thing you have to do in order to put that practical project up somewhere that people can practically use it. Getting a Django application up and running in such a way as to not destroy your server when you get slashdotted (or whatever the kids call it nowadays) is the one thing nobody on Team Perfectionist seems to know how to do well enough to tell anyone else about, so they simply elect to avoid the subject altogether. What do they talk about instead? Regular expressions! Thank you, Mr. Hideous Neckbeard, I had no idea what regular expressions were until you came along. Your pandering rapport has completely distracted me the fact that the only way to get decent caching behavior out of your framework is to outfit it with third-party solutions that patch up the holes in your code.

This title is marginally better than APress' "Definitive Guide to Django" but not so much so as to make it worth the money they charge. Why it's taking them so long to reach 1.0 is a mystery to me as their "roadmap" is a joke rife with non-features, but this book definitely ain't compatible with the current beta, so it's practically useless.

5 out of 5 stars

A must have! July 7, 2008
3 out of 6 found this review helpful

This book certainly doesn't disappoint. The examples are excellent, and can easily be abstracted and applied to just about any Django project. I found the TemplateTag examples to be particularly helpful.

The book is an easy read, and is a great companion to The Deinfitive Guide to Django. Two thumbs way up.

4 out of 5 stars

Good, but poorly timed August 15, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

This book is a great book. 2 nits. One big, one small.

Nit #1: "Admonitions" seems a bit contrived.

Nit #2: This book should have either been released earlier or released 3 months later. The game is changing with 1.0 and all previous books will require fixes and updates to work. This increases the barrier to entry for newbies and should be rectified as soon as possible.

[Update: Word is there will be a hg repo for updated code samples. Now retracting Nit #2]

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