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

2. Models and Migrations

Overview

This chapter introduces you to the concept of databases and their importance in building web applications. You will start by creating a database using an open-source database visualization tool called SQLite DB Browser. You will then perform some basic Create Read Update Delete (CRUD) database operations using SQL commands. Then, you will learn about Django's Object Relational Mapping (ORM), using which your application can interact and seamlessly work with a relational database using simple Python code, eliminating the need to run complex SQL queries. You will learn about models and migrations, which are a part of Django's ORM, that are used to propagate database schematic changes from the application to the database, and also perform database CRUD operations. Toward the end of the chapter, you will study the various types of database relationships and use that knowledge to perform queries across related records.