[CentralOH] Book Review: The Definitive Guide to Django Web Development Done Right

[jep200404 at columbus.rr.com]

The Definitive Guide to Django
Web Development Done Right
by Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Copyright 2008

I recently dived into Django and began with this book. 
The first five chapters were tutorial and find. 
The examples were good and the book matched reality. 
There were a few minor errors of no great consequence. 

Starting with Chapter 6, I was no longer able to follow the book. 
I don't think this was due to any fault of the authors, 
but was due to Django changing enough since the book was 
written so that there were too many differences to figure 
out and work around for the book to be useful. 

>From there I went to the newer 2.0 version online[3]. 
Not surprisingly, it matches current Django much better. 
Also, there are annotations and comments by others that can be helpful. 

Unfortunately, the free online version does not have the figures. 
For Chapter 6, one needs to use the old 2008 paper version and 
the free online version together, using the text of the online 
version and the figures of the 2008 paper version. 

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At some point I needed to deal with "Writing custom django-admin 
commands"[1], which is based on an example from a different 
tutorial[2], so I worked through both. The tutorial is pretty 
good. "Writing custom django-admin commands" has errors of commission 
and omission that seasoned djangonauts can easily work around, 
but can flummox novices. 

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/custom-management-commands/
[2] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/
[3] http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/