Effective Django

Note

There’s new content and tutorials coming!

Sign up to be notified with Effective Django is updated.

Note

Video of the tutorial from PyCon is available on YouTube.

Django is a popular, powerful web framework for Python. It has lots of “batteries” included, and makes it easy to get up and going. But all of the power means you can write low quality code that still seems to work. Effective Django development means building applications that are testable, maintainable, and scalable – not only in terms of traffic or load, but in terms of being able to add developers to projects. After reading Effective Django you should have an understanding of how Django’s pieces fit together, how to use them to engineer web applications, and where to look to dig deeper.

These documents are a combination of the notes and examples developed for talks prepared for PyCon 2012, PyOhio 2012, and PyCon 2013, and for Eventbrite web engineering. I’m still working on fleshing them out into a single document, but I hope you find them useful.

Feedback, suggestions, and questions may be sent to nathan@yergler.net. You can find (and fork) the source on github.

These documents are available in PDF and EPub format, as well.

Contents

• Introduction
• Effective Django Tutorial
  • Getting Started
  • Using Models
  • Writing Views
  • Using Static Assets
  • Additional Generic Views
  • Form Basics
  • Related Models
  • Handling Authentication & Authorization
• Testing in Django
  • Testing Django
  • Writing a Unit Test
  • Test Client
  • Request Factory
  • Running Tests
  • Further Reading
• Understanding Middleware
  • Overview of Middleware
  • Middleware Hooks
  • Typical Uses
  • Middleware Example
  • Request Middleware
  • Response Middleware
  • Writing Your Own
  • WSGI Middleware
• Databases & Models
  • Configuring the Database
  • Writing Models
  • Working with Models
  • What Goes in Models
  • Saving Data
  • Managers
  • Testing
  • Querying Your Data
  • ORM Performance
• Class Based Views
  • Class Based Views
  • Using Class Based Views
  • Idiomatic Class Based Views
  • HTTP Methods
  • Writing Composable Views
• Forms
  • Form Basics
  • Validation
  • Testing
  • Rendering Forms
  • Forms for Models
  • Form Sets
  • Advanced & Miscellaneous Detritus
• Acknowledgments
• Further Reading

Everything In Its Right Place

Views	Convert Request to Response
Forms	Convert input to Python objects
Models	Data and business logic