Django for Professionals: Production websites with Python & Django

by William S. Vincent

Learn how to build production-ready websites with Python & Django.

This book covers in-depth how professional Django programmers do their job and build real-world web applications. Topics covered include Docker, environment variables, payments, search, permissions, file/image uploads, testing, security, performance, and deployment.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction
Chapter 1: Docker
*Chapter 2: PostgreSQL
Chapter 3: Bookstore Project
Chapter 4: Pages App
Chapter 5: User Registration
Chapter 6: Static Assets
Chapter 7: Advanced User Registration
Chapter 8: Environment Variables
Chapter 9: Email
Chapter 10: Books App
Chapter 11: Reviews App
Chapter 12: File/Image Uploads
Chapter 13: Permissions
Chapter 14: Orders with Stripe
Chapter 15: Search
Chapter 16: Performance
Chapter 17: Security
Chapter 18: Deployment
Conclusion

Genres: Programming, Technology, Computer Science, Coding

382 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 20, 2019

Reviews

[Belhor Crowley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read the docs. Docs are your only way to salvation. These books are useless unless you only want to do CRUD.

[Vo Tat Dat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though this book can not compare with the Official Docs, it's still a good book, easy to read, easy to follow. I read from beginning to the end in 2 days, not deep but broad. The book gives a good picture about applying Django in Web development, even it's not really "professional" enough.

[estw · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is really bad. Not sure why it's called "for professionals", it really should have been a part of the first "beginners" book. Author doesn't properly introduce relatively simple concepts, for example custom permissions. Just gives a link to official django documentation. But at the same time he spends good portion of the book creating similar projects from the scratch for every chapter and describing it in detail.
Stay away from this book. And his other django books, I've read them all.

[Matthias Lambrecht · Rating 4 out of 5]

tl;dr: Not for professionals, but still a good introduction to working with Django

I felt there is a certain mismatch of expectations vs actual content in this book.

William provides a well-written tour from the first steps to setting up a Django project to deploying it to a live environment. With this, it becomes an excellent alternative to the official Django tutorial, allowing a reader to create a MVP project in a couple of afternoons.

There's a good balance between code samples and explanations, and there are no sudden difficulty spikes or any other obstacles to progressing through the chapters.
The book also includes a decent sprinkling of best practices and useful tools, and the final chapter hands new developers exactly what they need to present their "local experiment" to a wider audience.

Now for the less pleasant bits:
The app we build in the book is kept very simple, requiring little to no customisation of Django's default views. It would be nice if William had included at least one in-depth example where "default" doesn't cut it. A good way might have been to include 1-2 additional chapters (or optional exercises) that add extra functionality, such as custom views to add reviews, or rate and register new books.

The other (and in my opinion more critical) flaw is that many in-depth aspects that are essential to using Django in production are either summarised very briefly (e.g. using CDNs for static/media files, caching) or not really touched upon at all (e.g. best practices on Django app architecture, test cases for the latter parts). This could somewhat be remedied if they were presented as "coding exercise" prompts at the end of each chapter, but all things considered the content feels too superficial to justify the "for Professionals" moniker.

With that being said, it's still a good introduction for newcomers to the ecosystem, but don't expect too much from this title if you've already spent some time working with Django.

[Peter Augustinak · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this one right after "Django for Beginners". I have to say that there is no big jump between those two. First, maybe third of the book is just repeating the same starting processes as in the Beginners one, what is a little bit annoying when you are following both books back-to-back. Not sure if this was necessary, because when somebody chooses book "for Professionals" in the name, I suppose he/she is very familiar with the basics.

In some parts books suddenly "stops" explaining important stuff with note "this is out of the scope of this book". Additionally, the project overall seems to me even less advanced then in the Beginners book.

Anyway some chapters gave me a lot, like deployment part using docker so I still consider it very useful in general. There is definitely a pieces worth to check.

Additional note: The author is noting in the end that he is answering for every email with suggestions, but I still haven't hear from him after I sent my review for the first book like more than a month ago :)

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good introduction to Docker but not a lot of new Django information.

Bookstore example project pretty simple for a "professional" Django project and not very different from the Blog project in Django for Beginners.

Noticed a couple of typos and errors throughout the book. Something to consider if you're planning to purchase.

Really a lot of overlap with Django for Beginners, so I'd probably recommend just reading one of these two books (this one) so that you can just get up and running with Docker right away. No reason to learn and mess around with virtual environments if best practice is to use Docker anyway.

Django for APIs is a stand alone book and can probably also be read if you're interested in this.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good book on getting "the gist" of django for production and using docker. Covered a lot of good things that I've not been sure of and put it into words, would recommend it for someone with less than 3 years experience of Django.

What I would have wished more from it would be a summary of all the steps in the end and sometimes it can give more background when introducing subjects, as the author clearly have the ability to describe things in a way that's easy to get. So wouldn't hurt if the book was 30 pages longer.

[Trey Piepmeier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book like most technical books--read the beginning in detail and then skimmed and skipped to parts that were relevant to what I was trying to learn. This is a really good, solid foundation and the basis for how I have Cassette Nest running now.

It's also frustratingly lacking in some areas, especially as it pertains to deploying. Perhaps the latest edition is better in that regard.

[Relax, you're doing fine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book to learn Django. In this book, the author teaches you about both Django and basic Docker, and how to develop and deploy a website in a professional way. The book covers many topics from development to security and deployment, so it's hard to say it goes deep enough but for quick and overview learning, it's a good book.

[Jetske · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would recommend reading this if you're looking for an introduction, but "professionals" would need much more in-depth information than this book holds. It was easy to read and helped me understand Django and the MVT pattern, but I had really hoped to learn more than that, especially about how to structure a larger scale website and testing.

[Tom Hughes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really useful guide

This guide to developing Django Web development contained in a Docker container is very helpful. You'll have to develop troubleshooting skills and really dig in, but the author generously provides links to websites that provides the background information that you'll use for life.

[Flávio · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good introductory book. I think if you have read the prequel "Django for Beginners" you'll also find that only 1/3 of the book has anything new, and I advise new readers to skip the first one and read this instead

[Manish Choudhary · Rating 5 out of 5]

the content is awesome but the deployment should be more inlined to IaaS instead of Paas.

[Ahsan Habib · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a good book to read on Django, especially for beginners. I like the simple way of delivery.