Book Image

Learning Python

By : Fabrizio Romano
Book Image

Learning Python

By: Fabrizio Romano

Overview of this book

Learning Python has a dynamic and varied nature. It reads easily and lays a good foundation for those who are interested in digging deeper. It has a practical and example-oriented approach through which both the introductory and the advanced topics are explained. Starting with the fundamentals of programming and Python, it ends by exploring very different topics, like GUIs, web apps and data science. The book takes you all the way to creating a fully fledged application. The book begins by exploring the essentials of programming, data structures and teaches you how to manipulate them. It then moves on to controlling the flow of a program and writing reusable and error proof code. You will then explore different programming paradigms that will allow you to find the best approach to any situation, and also learn how to perform performance optimization as well as effective debugging. Throughout, the book steers you through the various types of applications, and it concludes with a complete mini website built upon all the concepts that you learned.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Learning Python
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The Django web framework


For our project, we're going to use one of the most popular web frameworks you can find in the Python ecosystem: Django.

A web framework is a set of tools (libraries, functions, classes, and so on) that we can use to code a website. We need to decide what kind of requests we want to allow to be issued against our web server and how we respond to them. A web framework is the perfect tool to do that because it takes care of many things for us so that we can concentrate only on the important bits without having to reinvent the wheel.

Note

There are different types of frameworks. Not all of them are designed for writing code for the web. In general, a framework is a tool that provides functionalities to facilitate the development of software applications, products and solutions.

Django design philosophy

Django is designed according to the following principles:

  • DRY: As in, Don't Repeat Yourself. Don't repeat code, and code in a way that makes the framework deduce as much as...