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

In this chapter, we looked at how we can deal with binary files and how Python's standard library, which comes pre-loaded with the necessary tools, can allow us to handle commonly used file formats such as CSV. We then moved on to learning how to read and write CSV files in Python using Python's CSV module. Later, we worked with the XlsxWriter package, which provides us with the ability to generate Microsoft Excel-compatible files right from our Python environment without worrying about the internal formatting of the file.

The second half of the chapter was dedicated to learning how to use the weasyprint library to generate PDF versions of HTML pages. This skill can come in handy when we want to provide our users with an easy option to print the HTML version of our page with any added CSS styling of our choosing. The last section of the chapter discussed how we can generate interactive graphs in Python and render them as HTML pages that can be viewed inside the...