Book Image

Mastering Django: Core

By : Nigel George
Book Image

Mastering Django: Core

By: Nigel George

Overview of this book

Mastering Django: Core is a completely revised and updated version of the original Django Book, written by Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss - the creators of Django. The main goal of this book is to make you a Django expert. By reading this book, you’ll learn the skills needed to develop powerful websites quickly, with code that is clean and easy to maintain. This book is also a programmer’s manual that provides complete coverage of the current Long Term Support (LTS) version of Django. For developers creating applications for commercial and business critical deployments, Mastering Django: Core provides a complete, up-to-date resource for Django 1.8LTS with a stable code-base, security fixes and support out to 2018.
Table of Contents (33 chapters)
Mastering Django: Core
Credits
About the Author
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to Django and Getting Started

Defining Models in Python


As we discussed earlier in Chapter 1, Introduction to Django and Getting Started, the M in MTV stands for Model. A Django model is a description of the data in your database, represented as Python code. It's your data layout-the equivalent of your SQL CREATE TABLE statements-except it's in Python instead of SQL, and it includes more than just database column definitions.

Django uses a model to execute SQL code behind the scenes and return convenient Python data structures representing the rows in your database tables. Django also uses models to represent higher-level concepts that SQL can't necessarily handle.

If you're familiar with databases, your immediate thought might be, "Isn't it redundant to define data models in Python instead of in SQL?" Django works the way it does for several reasons:

  • Introspection requires overhead and is imperfect. In order to provide convenient data-access APIs, Django needs to know the database layout somehow, and there are two ways...