Book Image

Web Development with Django

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest
Book Image

Web Development with Django

By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications which stand out from the crowd, rather than spending hours on boilerplate code? Then the Django framework is where you should begin. Often referred to as a 'batteries included' web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application. Web Development with Django takes this philosophy and equips you with the knowledge and confidence to build real-world applications using Python. Starting with the essential concepts of Django, you'll cover its major features by building a website called Bookr – a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects that are presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you progress, you'll learn various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. Throughout this book, you'll cover key daily tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Django.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface

Introduction

"The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines." It's a tagline that aptly describes Django, a framework that has been around for over 10 years now. It is battle-tested and widely used, with more and more people using it every day. All this might make you think that Django is old and no longer relevant. On the contrary, its longevity has proved that its Application Programming Interface (API) is reliable and consistent, and even those who learned Django v1.0 in 2007 can mostly write the same code for Django 3 today. Django is still in active development, with bugfixes and security patches being released monthly.

Like Python, the language in which it is written, Django is easy to learn, yet powerful and flexible enough to grow with your needs. It is a "batteries-included" framework, which is to say that you do not have to find and install many other libraries or components to get your application up and running. Other frameworks, such as...