Book notes

June 3, 2008    Django, Meta

A few notes about the book:

• No, there will not be a free download like Jacob and Adrian’s book. I believe an e-book version will be available, but it’ll be a for-pay download from Apress. I’m OK with that, because they’ve already given one Django book away, and I’d like them to make some money so they can keep publishing.
• Yes, it’s written on the assumption of a checkout of Django trunk. A recent checkout (I was tracking queryset-refactor on the — correct — assumption that it would merge before my press date). There is absolutely no way whatsoever that you’ll be able to work through the book using the 0.96 release, which is a good thing: it means you’ve got less work to do to upgrade to 1.0 when it lands.
• The book covers three applications: a simple CMS based on django.contrib.flatpages, a weblog, and a code-sharing application similar to the one in use on djangosnippets. It deliberately leaves lots of room for you to go back and add or tweak features once the book has moved on.
• Because the current iteration of django.contrib.admin is going to be replaced before 1.0, I deliberately stayed away from discussion of customizing/hacking on the admin interface. The official Django docs do a good job of that already and, unlike a printed book, they can update immediately when newforms-admin lands.
• I wrote with the assumption that, once something’s been explained in prose and demonstrated in a code sample, there’s no need to keep coming back to it over and over again; if you didn’t get it the first time, you can always go back a few pages and read over the explanation again. This means the book moves quite a bit faster as you get deeper into it, and assumes you’ll be able to keep up.
• The style of the book resembles the Django tutorial in some ways: there are numerous occasions where I show you the wrong way to do something, then explain why it’s wrong and show the correct way.
• Speaking of correct ways to do things: this book encourages best practices for application development whenever possible. This means standalone apps on the Python path, decoupling from project cruft and a whole chapter devoted to principles of reusable, distributable application development

No clue yet when it’ll actually appear on bookstore shelves, but theoretically sometime within the next month.