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

1. Introduction to Django

Overview

This chapter introduces you to Django and its role in web development. You will begin by learning how the Model View Template (MVT) paradigm works and how Django processes HTTP requests and responses. Equipped with the basic concepts, you'll create your first Django project, called Bookr, an application for adding, viewing, and managing book reviews. It's an application you'll keep enhancing and adding features to throughout this book. You will then learn about the manage.py command (used to orchestrate Django actions). You will use this command to start the Django development server and test whether the code you've written works as expected. You will also learn how to work with PyCharm, a popular Python IDE that you'll be using throughout this book. You will use it to write code that returns a response to your web browser. Finally, you'll learn how to use PyCharm's debugger to troubleshoot problems with...