Django for Beginners, Fifth Edition: Build Modern Web Applications with Python

William S. Vincent

Jul 2024 · Still River Press

About this eBook

🌟 Completely updated for Django 5! 🌟

Django for Beginners is a project-based introduction to Django, the popular Python-based web framework. It is suitable for total beginners who have never built a website before and professional programmers looking for a fast-paced guide to modern web development and Django fundamentals.

The completely revised fifth edition takes a practical approach, introducing concepts through six projects designed to simulate real-world scenarios. From a Hello World website to a message board application, a blogging platform, and a newspaper CMS, you'll learn about Django's architecture and how to add new functionality step-by-step.

This book is for readers with basic Python knowledge and programmers transitioning to Django from other web frameworks. It is a fast-paced guide that aligns with current best practices and modern web development with Django, ensuring you're learning the most relevant and applicable skills.

In the book you’ll learn how to:

* Build 6 websites from scratch, including a Blog platform and Newspaper CMS

* Deploy online using security best practices

* Implement signup, login, logout, password change, and password reset

* Customize the look and feel of your sites

* Write tests and run them for all your code

* Add permissions and authorizations to make your app more secure

If you’re curious about Python-based web development, Django for Beginners is a best-practices guide to writing, testing, and deploying your own websites quickly.

Ratings and reviews

This book takes an unusual approach: it begins with a very simple Helloworld type Django project and immediately introduces version control, testing, and deployment. This is then repeated with successively more complex projects. For me, this repetition helped to reinforce learning. The text is well written and easy to follow, with plenty of screenshots and helpful links which open your browser and take you to the Django documentation. With such a broad range of topics the depth of treatment has to be reduced. The projects rely entirely on generic class-based views and so only scratch the surface of Django. Similarly, the sections on testing are little more than an introduction. Also, the deployments are specific to Heroku. Yet this is all valuable because the combination of testing and version control take the stress and anxiety out of changing your code. If you already have experience with Django you might find this book too simple but I can firmly recommend it for newc

Sin duda el mejor libro para empezar con el framework Django. Explica en detalle cada uno de los pasos, usando para ello pequeños proyectos completos. El libro da las mejores recomendaciones en cuanto a buenas prácticas con el framework y de ingeniería del software. Al finalizar este libro, se tiene una base sólida para continuar con el aprendizaje y profundización en Django.

About the author

William S. Vincent is a former Django Software Foundation Board Member and the author of three books on Django. He co-hosts the Django Chat podcast, co-writes the weekly Django News newsletter, and runs LearnDjango.com. He has also built popular third-party packages, spoken at multiple DjangoCon conferences, and taught computer science at Williams College.