Although I am a huge Java fan, about a year ago I started a Django based project, I knew that there has to be a better way to develop web applications (without tons of xml). I was right! I decided to buy a book about this framework. I chose APress position, “The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right” because of the authors: Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Jacob used to work for the Lawrence Journal-World, the newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas where Django was developed.
This is the second edition of this book, it is updated for Django 1.1. Adrian and Jacob say that the goal of this book is to make you a Django expert and I confirm it. What is more important, you don’t have to be an expert before reading it. You should have basic knowledge about programming (e.g. if, while, data structures, lists, hashes, variables, classes and objects). It is helpful to have some experience with web development, but it is not necessary. It is strange but you don’t even have to be a Python programmer – I wasn’t. If you don’t know syntax, you can learn it while reading this book.
“The Definitive Guide to django…” is also known as “The Django Book” and it is available for free in the Internet, see http://djangobook.com. Take a look at it, read some chapters and check if it is worth buying. In my opinion it is. You can use online version to find out something during coding but it is much easier to learn and read paper version.
I’ve noticed one flaw, there is no information about unit testing. In my opinion it is very important, because there isn’t any compiler or IDE which shows you problems after for example changing method signature :/ Since you can do unit testing in Python (unittest) and Django supports it (“Testing Django applications”), authors of the book should take it into consideration and mention about it.