Why Work with this Book?
This book will save you time. On many occasions we’ve seen clever students get stuck, spending
hours trying to fight with Django and other aspects of web development. More often than not, the
problem was usually because a key piece of information was not provided, or something was not
made clear. While the occasional blip might set you back 10-15 minutes, sometimes they can take
hours to resolve. We’ve tried to remove as many of these hurdles as possible. This will mean you
can get on with developing your application instead of stumbling along.
This book will lower the learning curve. Web application frameworks can save you a lot of hassle
and lot of time. Well, that is if you know how to use them in the first place! Often the learning curve
is steep. This book tries to get you going - and going fast by explaining how all the pieces fit together.
This book will improve your workflow. Using web application frameworks requires you to pick
up and run with a particular design pattern - so you only have to fill in certain pieces in certain
places. After working with many students, we heard lots of complaints about using web application
frameworks - specifically about how they take control away from them (i.e. inversion of control).
To help you, we’ve created a number of workflows to focus your development process so that you
can regain that sense of control and build your web application in a disciplined manner.
This book is not designed to be read. Whatever you do, do not read this book! It is a hands-on
guide to building web applications in Django. Reading is not doing. To increase the value you gain
from this experience, go through and develop the application. When you code up the application,
do not just cut and paste the code. Type it in, think about what it does, then read the explanations
we have provided to describe what is going on. If you still do not understand, then check out the
Django documentation, go to Stack Overflow or other helpful websites and fill in this gap in your
knowledge. If you are really stuck, get in touch with us, so that we can improve this resource - we’ve
already had contributions from numerous other readers!