The Django Book

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Developed and used over two years by an online-news operation, Django was designed to handle two challenges: the intensive deadlines of a newsroom and the stringent requirements of the experienced Web developers who wrote it. The goal of this book is to explain all the things Django does and gives the reader enough technical specifics to understand how Django works. This book is not intended to be a tutorial or reference, those who’re ready to start a project should check the Django documentation for more detailed information. To develop a site using Django, a developer writes Python code that uses the Django libraries. Although this book doesn’t include a full Python tutorial, it highlights Python features and functionality where appropriate, particularly when code doesn’t immediately make sense. Regardless of how many powerful features it has, a Web framework is worthless if it doesn’t save developer’s time. Django’s philosophy is to do all it can to facilitate fast development. With Django, a developer can build Web sites in a matter of hours, not days; weeks, not years. Beyond the productivity advantages inherent in Python, Django itself makes every effort to encourage rapid development. Every part of the framework was designed with productivity in mind. This will be detailed in many examples throughout this book. Finally, Django strictly maintains a clean design throughout its own code and makes it easy to follow a good web-applications development practices.