Blog.Project13.pl

As I’ve joined MediaFrame a few weeks ago, I was presented 2 projects to choose from. One of them was Php driven and another one Python + Django. I’ve allways wanted to learn Python – although I’m not really keen on Django (it has some nice things about it though) – and thus I joined the second project. I needed to learn basic Python and Django really quick, in order to quickly start coding, so I bought 2 books, one about Python and this one: “Python Web Development with Django” as it’s the only book about Django in Polish, and the Team Leader recommended it to me. So… let this be the first in a series of coding book reviews:

Python Web Development with Django (in polish “Python i Django. Programowanie aplikacji webowych“) by Jeff Forcier, Paul Bissex, Wesley Chun. This book is clearly aimed at beginners, not only in Python or Django but in WedDevelopment as such. Thanks to this, it’s really easy to read and understand. Well, Django itself is quite easy to understand as are most of trendy frameworks out there.

As for what it is, a beginner book, aimed at introducing people to both Python and Django, it does it’s job very well. We get to know all the basic stuff Django offers, the CRUD generator, ORM framework and template system. There are also 3 more or less real life applications written and described in the book – a photo upload service, an ajax chat (jQuery with JSON) and a simple CMS website.

All in all, it does go over all the major features of Django, the main problem (for me) with it is that it doesn’t go any deeper into any of Djangos potential, sometimes even directly stating that something won’t be covered here and sending us straight to the Official Django Documentation. I know that it’s the best place for up to date infos, but that’s not why I pay for a book about some technology, right? ;-) That said, let’s sum up what I think about this book:

Pros:

• Nice intro into Django and Python
• Sample apps are fun and quite “real”
• Easy to read, doesn’t make your head boil from millions of hacks per line ;-)

Cons:

• Doesn’t cover anything more advanced, like more examples on custom tag creation and “best practices“
• Everything covered in this book could be easily looked up online (documentation + “django book”), it doesn’t add much more to the topic…
• It didn’t convert me into a django fan ;-)