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 introduced REST APIs, a fundamental building block in most real-world web applications. These APIs facilitate communication between the backend server and the web browser, so they are central to your growth as a Django web developer. We learned how to serialize data in our database so that it can be transmitted via an HTTP request. We also learned the various options DRF gives us to simplify the code we write, taking advantage of the existing definitions of the models themselves. We also covered viewsets and routers, and saw how they can be used to condense code even further by combining the functionality of multiple views. We also learned about authentication and authorization and implemented token-based authentication for the book review app. In the next chapter, we will extend Bookr's functionality for its users by learning how to generate CSVs, PDFs, and other binary filetypes.