Django Unleashed

Django is an amazingly powerful system for creating modern, dynamic websites. But programming Django hasn’t always been easy–until now. Django Unleashed is your step-by-step, beginner-friendly guide to leveraging Django’s core capabilities and its powerful contributed library. You’ll learn in the most effective way possible: hands on, by building a fully functional Django website from scratch. You’ll even deploy the website to the cloud.

As you build your website, expert Django consultant and trainer Andrew Pinkham reveals how websites operate; how Django makes building websites easy; how to write Python code that leverages its immense capabilities; and how to build solutions that are robust, reliable, and secure. You’ll start simply and learn to solve increasingly challenging problems: mastering new features and understanding how Django’s architecture shapes their behavior, and gaining essential knowledge for working with any web framework, not just Django.

Drawing on his extensive experience teaching Django, Pinkham answers the key questions beginners ask most often. And as you gain experience, you’ll learn advanced techniques for enhancing site functionality and performance, strengthening security, promoting code reuse, and much more.

Detailed information on how to…

• Quickly start a new Django project and establish a strong foundation for a growing site
• Define how your data is organized and create a SQLite database to manage it
• Quickly produce HTML with Django templates
• Create dynamic webpages with Django’s URL patterns and views, including function views, class-based views, and generic views
• Enable efficient, reliable data input with Django Forms and custom form validations
• Understand the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, compare it to Model-Template-Views, and gain a holistic understanding of Django’s structure
• Write as little code as possible, simplify code reuse, and mitigate software decay by adhering to the Don’t Repeat Yourself paradigm.
• Dive into Django source code to troubleshoot problems
• Extend site functionality with Django’s contributed library
• Protect your site with user authentication and permissions
• Avoid security pitfalls such as SQL Injection, XSS, and CSRF
• Optimize site performance
• Deploy your site to a managed cloud service and to a PostgreSQL database

Table of Contents

Part I Django’s Core Features
Chapter 1 Starting a New Django Project: Building a Startup Categorizer with Blog
Chapter 2 Hello World: Building a Basic Webpage in Django
Chapter 3 Programming Django Models and Creating a SQLite Database
Chapter 4 Rapidly Producing Flexible HTML with Django Templates
Chapter 5 Creating Webpages with Controllers in Django: Views and URL Configurations
Chapter 6 Integrating Models, Templates, Views, and URL Configurations to Create Links between Webpages
Chapter 7 Allowing User Input with Forms
Chapter 8 Displaying Forms in Templates
Chapter 9 Controlling Forms in Views
Chapter 10 Revisiting Migrations
Chapter 11 Bending the Rules: The Contact Us Webpage
Chapter 12 The Big Picture

Part II Djangos Contributed Libraries
Chapter 13 Django’s Contributed Library
Chapter 14 Pagination: A Tool for Navigation
Chapter 15 Creating Webpages with Django Flatpages
Chapter 16 Serving Static Content with Django
Chapter 17 Understanding Generic Class-Based Views
Chapter 18 Advanced Generic Class-Based View Usage
Chapter 19 Basic Authentication
Chapter 20 Integrating Permissions
Chapter 21 Extending Authentication
Chapter 22 Overriding Django’s Authentication with a Custom User
Chapter 23 The Admin Library

Part III Advanced Core Features
Chapter 24 Creating Custom Managers and Querysets
Chapter 25 Handling Behavior with Signals
Chapter 26 Optimizing Our Site for Speed
Chapter 27 Building Custom Template Tags
Chapter 28 Adding RSS and Atom Feeds and a Sitemap
Chapter 29 Deploy!
Chapter 30 Starting a New Project Correctly

Part IV Appendixes
A HTTP
B Python Primer
C Relational Database Basics
D Security Basics
E Regular Expressions
F Compilation Basics
G Installing Python, Django, and Your Tools