Book Review: Two Scoops of Django 1.11

Review

Title: Two Scoops of Django 1.11

Author: Daniel Greenfeld, Audrey Roy Greenfeld

Daily work doesn't always allows to get as deep as I'd want deep into some of the tools and frameworks I use, so I decided to read a book about Django and learn a thing or two. This title has really good reviews and was recommended to me by a few colleagues so was a simple choice. I also took my time to read it because I was applying many of the concepts to one of my side projects (as it is one of the best ways to learn, by practising).

The book is a modern equivalent of those old Assembler, C or Pascal books, with dozens of chapters and trying to cover so many things you could feel overwhelmed. And I say modern because one thing that it does improve a lot is how everything is explained. Instead of the old, hard to digest reference books, the authors create a fictional company (to sell ice cream) with the website using Django and evolve almost all of the topics covered by applying them to or exemplifying them using that company and products.

This is a big book, around 500 pages and 35 chapters, and while there are some drawings, most of it it's either text or code (but fear not, as examples are small, concise and easily readable). I'll just list the most relevant topics/chapters so that you can grasp how much content there is:

• Best practices and advices on how to setup Django projects
• Settings
• Models, Admin, core components
• ORM
• Function-Based Views and Class-Based Views
• Forms
• Templates, tags, filters, and optionally switching to Jinja2
• Django REST Framework and REST APIs in general
• Third-party packages (also non-django specific ones)
• Testing
• Async task queues
• Security
• Logging
• Signals
• Deployment (and a brief intro to Continuous Integration)
• Debugging
• Coding style guidelines

It is my first Django book read, but I consider it a must if you're past the official website tutorial (excellent but brief). I've definitely learned a lot 🤓