Review of "Learning Website Development with Django"

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been playing around with Django. Because of that, I’ve been looking at a few different books on the subject. I first started out with the Django Book, which took me a few days to read. I can’t say I absorbed it all, but I got the general idea. Then I decided to look into other books and found Learning Website Development with Django, by Ayman Hourieh. I started right away.

The book’s subtitle, “A beginner’s tutorial to building web applications, quickly and cleanly, with the Django application framework,” frames the book perfectly. Its target audience is programmers (moderately) familiar with Python, but who are, at the same time, new to Django. The book is really focused towards this audience. The other key word in the subtitle is “quickly.” This book moves along in a hurry while creating the demonstration app. I was quite comfortable (and pleased) by the pace, however, I can imagine that a more novice programmer may have a harder time dealing with the information flying by.

The book centers on building one app, a social bookmarking website similar to del.icio.us, or ma.gnolia. I think type of site was a good choice, since it provides the author with a varying degree of complexity to play around with. It allowed Mr. Hourieh to start with the basics. This book succeeds in starting simple and getting harder as it goes along. I also thought it was good to focus on creating just one website, rather than a bunch of mini-projects or examples, since it models a more real-life situation. The idea of a social bookmarking website, as well, is very useful because its features are currently en vogue, and can be found on many current sites.

Chapters One and Two are the obligatory “what is Django” and “how to install” chapters. The meat of the book starts in Chapter Three when the project is introduced. By the end of this third chapter, we’ve already quickly written three database models (Links, Users, and Bookmarks) and the main page. Chapter Four introduces Django’s built-in user authentication system (django.contrib.auth), and describes how to write login, logout, and registration pages. Chapter Five instructs us to write an additional database model (tags), which is more complex than the models we wrote previously. Here we also write pages to display the list of bookmarks, bookmarks by tags, and a tag cloud. [To illustrate how fast we’re moving, Chapter Five ends on page 91]

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