William S. Vincent - Django for Beginners: Build websites with Python and Django (Welcome to Django Book 1)

Welcome to Django for Beginners, a project-based approach to learning web development with the Django web framework. In this book you will build five progressively more complex web applications, starting with a simple Hello, World app, progressing to a blog app with forms and user accounts, and finally a newspaper app using a custom user model, email integration, foreign keys, authorization, permissions, and more.

By the end of this book you should feel confident creating your own Django projects from scratch using current best practices.

Django is a free, open source web framework written in the Python programming language and used by millions of programmers every year. Its popularity is due to its friendliness to both beginners and advanced programmers: Django is robust enough to be used by the largest websites in the worldInstagram, Pinterest, Bitbucket, Disqusbut also flexible enough to be a good choice for early-stage startups and prototyping personal projects.

This book is regularly updated and features the latest versions of both Django (2.1) and Python (3.7x). It also uses Pipenv which is now the officially recommended package manager by Python.org for managing Python packages and virtual environments. Throughout well be using modern best practices from the Django, Python, and web development communities, especially the thorough use of testing.

A web framework is a collection of modular tools that abstracts away much of the difficultyand repetitioninherent in web development. For example, most websites need the same basic functionality: the ability to connect to a database, set URL routes, display content on a page, handle security properly, and so on. Rather than recreate all of this from scratch, programmers over the years have created web frameworks in all the major programming languages: Django and Flask in Python, Rails in Ruby, and Express in JavaScript among many, many others.

Django inherited Pythons batteries-included approach and includes out-of-the box support for common tasks in web development:

• user authentication
• templates, routes, and views
• admin interface
• robust security
• support for multiple database backends
• and much much more

This approach makes our job as web developers much, much easier. We can focus on what makes our web application unique rather than reinventing the wheel when it comes to standard web application functionality.

In contrast, several popular frameworksmost notably Flask in Python and Express in JavaScriptadopt a microframework approach. They provide only the bare minimum required for a simple web page and leave it up to the developer to install and configure third-party packages to replicate basic website functionality. This approach provides more flexibility to the developer but also yields more opportunities for mistakes.

As of 2018 Django has been under active development for over 13 years which makes it a grizzled veteran in software years. Millions of programmers have already used Django to build their websites. And this is undeniably a good thing. Web development is hard. It doesnt make sense to repeat the same codeand mistakeswhen a large community of brilliant developers has already solved these problems for us.

At the same time, Django remains under active development and has a yearly release schedule. The Django community is constantly adding new features and security improvements. If youre building a website from scratch Django is a fantastic choice.

I wrote this book because while Django is extremely well documented there is a severe lack of beginner-friendly tutorials available. When I first learned Django years ago I struggled to even complete the official polls tutorial. Why was this so hard I remember thinking?

With more experience I recognize now that the writers of the Django docs faced a difficult choice: they could emphasize Djangos ease-of-use or its depth, but not both. They choose the latter and as a professional developer I appreciate the choice, but as a beginner I found it sofrustrating!

My goal is that this book fills in the gaps and showcases how beginner-friendly Django really is.

You dont need previous Python or web development experience to complete this book. It is intentionally written so that even a total beginner can follow along and feel the magic of writing their own web applications from scratch. However if you are serious about a career in web development, you will eventually need to invest the time to learn Python, HTML, and CSS properly. A list of recommended resources for further study is included in the Conclusion.

We start by properly covering how to configure a local development environment in Chapter 1. Were using bleeding edge tools in this book: the most recent version of Django (2.0), Python (3.7), and Pipenv to manage our virtual environments. We also introduce the command line and discuss how to work with a modern text editor.

In Chapter 2 we build our first project, a minimal Hello, World application that demonstrates how to set up new Django projects. Because establishing good software practices is important, well also save our work with git and upload a copy to a remote code repository on Bitbucket.

In Chapter 3 we make, test, and deploy a Pages app that introduces templates and class-based views. Templates are how Django allows for DRY (Dont Repeat Yourself) development with HTML and CSS while class-based views require a minimal amount of code to use and extend core functionality in Django. Theyre awesome as youll soon see. We also add our first tests and deploy to Heroku which has a free tier well use throughout this book. Using platform-as-a-service providers like Heroku transforms development from a painful, time-consuming process into something that takes just a few mouse clicks.

In Chapter 4 we build our first database-backed project, a Message Board app. Django provides a powerful ORM that allows us to write concise Python for our database tables. Well explore the built-in admin app which provides a graphical way to interact with our data and can be even used as a Content Management System (CMS) similar to Wordpress. Of course we also write tests for all our code, store a remote copy on Bitbucket, and deploy to Heroku.

Finally in Chapters 5-7 were ready for our final project: a robust blog application that demonstrates how to perform CRUD (Create-Read-Update-Delete) functionality in Django. Well find that Djangos generic class-based views mean we have to write only a small amount of actual code for this! Then well add forms and integrate Djangos built-in user authentication system (log in, log out, sign up).

In Chapter 8 we start a Newspaper site and introduce the concept of custom user models, a Django best practice that is rarely covered in tutorials. Simply put all new projects should use a custom user model and in this chapter youll learn how. Chapter 9 covers user authentication, Chapter 10 adds Bootstrap for styling, and Chapters 11-12 implement password reset and change via email. In Chapters 13-15 we add articles and comments to our project, along with proper permissions and authorizations. We even learn some tricks for customizing the admin to display our growing data.