Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging Book Review

Posted by Peter Baumgartner on June 16, 2010. Filed under django, review

I just finished reading the copy of Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging by Karen M. Tracey provided to us for review by Packt Publishing. For those of you who don’t know, Karen is a core developer of Django and her knowledge and experience in the framework shines through in this book.

This is a great book for people who want to transition from being a hobbyist tinkering on Django sites to professional developers. It will be a lot to digest for a newcomer to Django and might not contain much new information if you’ve been working with Django for a while (and writing tests for your code). The book covers:

• doctests vs. unit tests
• integrating external tools like Nose, Coverage, and Twill
• debugging with logging, Django Debug Toolbar, and pdb
• how to get help from the Django community and file bugs
• troubleshooting Apache/mod_wsgi deployments

Even though ...

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Django 1.0 Template Development Book Review

Posted by Peter Baumgartner on October 15, 2009. Filed under django, review

Packt Publishing was nice enough to send us a copy of Django 1.0 Template Development by Scott Newman for review recently. I get most of my technical information via the web, so picking up a technical book was a nice change of pace. This is a well written and enjoyable read for people looking to learn a little more about Django than what is provided in the Django tutorial.

Based on the title, I expected a thorough write-up of the template system for front-end developers. With the way Django was designed, template developers need little, if any, knowledge of Python and what goes on under the hood with Django requests. I was surprised, however, to see that pure front-end (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) developers were not the target audience of this book:

This book is for web developers and template authors who want to fully understand and utilize the Django ...

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