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

Summary

This chapter was a quick introduction to Django. You first got up to speed on the HTTP protocol and the structure of HTTP requests and responses. We then saw how Django uses the MVT paradigm, and then how it parses a URL, generates an HTTP request, and sends it to a view to get an HTTP response. We scaffolded the Bookr project and then created the reviews app for it. We then built two example views to illustrate how to get data from a request and use it when rendering templates. You should have experimented to see how Django escapes output in HTML when rendering a template.

You did all this with the PyCharm IDE, and you learned how to set it up to debug your application. The debugger will help you find out why things aren't working as they should. In the next chapter, you will start to learn about Django's database integration and its model system, so you can start storing and retrieving real data for your application.