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

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we were introduced to databases, and we learned how to store, retrieve, update, and delete records from a database. We also learned how to create Django models and apply database migrations.

However, these database operations alone cannot display the application's data to a user. We need a way to display all the stored information in a meaningful way to the user; for example, displaying all the books present in our Bookr application's database, in a browser, in a presentable format. This is where Django views, templates, and URL mapping come into play. Views are the part of a Django application that takes in a web request and provides a web response. For example, a web request could be a user trying to view a website by entering the website address, and a web response could be the web site's home page loading in the user's browser. Views are one of the most important parts of a Django application, where the application logic...