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Our Django Book is Launched

pydanny.com

121–130 of 136 posts

Re: Our Django Book is Launched

#121
post #71

Congratulations! If I may suggest a few things: - How about adding a sample in the web page? - You may to consider using PayPal in addition to Gumroad. Gumroad is awesome, but some people may only be able to use PayPal (e.g. no International Credit Card) or prefer it. I use both for my book and I sell way more copies on PayPal.

+1 on payment options. As someone with a British credit card, the site won't verify my card (I suspect I need to be able to put my name as per card and address on it). So much for being able to buy it :(

I was able to use my HSBC Visa Debit card - there was no verification though - payment just went straight through.

Re: Our Django Book is Launched

#122
post #44
post #38

Considering purchasing since I was thinking of diving into django for my next project.. If I buy the PDF now, and you eventually release an EPUB or other format, will I get access to those files (with updates) as well?

Honestly, I don't know enough about ePub distribution to answer you. I would love to do that though.

Same here, will buy but I really want the ePub version for my eReader.

Re: Our Django Book is Launched

#123

I just completed reading it. I haven't been working with django recently and having completely read the book, I am now up to date. * The book has a lot of practical advice having developed using django for years. For example, the book recommends, whenever you have a custom manager, always explicitly define `objects` as the default manager, before the custom manager. * The book makes a recommendation; but also mention…

If this is off the top of your head, why post the exact same thing to reddit?

I posted it on reddit first off the top of my head directly.

Then I noticed the thread on Hacker News and started writing a comment; deleted it and copy-pasted from my own reddit comment and went to bed peacefully.

Which part of this is not right?

Re: Our Django Book is Launched

#124
post #96
post #91

This is a really great book. The formatting does need a lot of work (I see no chapter or section headings in the PDF) and an ePub version would be very useful. The actual content of this book is excellent though. I feel like I keep up with new developments in the Django community pretty well, but there's a lot of advice in this book I hadn't heard before.

Alright then, I'm one of the authors of this book. There are chapter and section headers in the book, but we've had a couple people using PDF readers on Linux who don't see them. Can you email me at pydanny@cartwheelweb.com and let me know which PDF reader you are using so we can test and hopefully fix the issue? Thanks!

I'm having trouble on Linux Mint stock pdf reader (Evince). No chapter numbers appear on the table of contents, and the chapter title doesn't appear on the chapter pages

By the way, if you update the book, will we get the updates as well?

Re: Our Django Book is Launched

#125
post #101

Is there a way to buy it using PayPal? Am not to keen on sending a credit card number...

Our publisher, gumroad, uses Stripe to accept payments. If that doesn't work, we're looking into PayPal, but that might be a few days.

I found the checkout process needlessly confusing. The split between the first and second page once I clicked was not clear to me, and the name of the button beside the price box was "Gift". With the arrow above it specifying a price, I didn't understand if I was entering the price of the book, or an additional sum. Could I have paid less and still received the book?

Finally, once I have paid for the book, it seems I can't get back to the page again, so I guess I'm not supposed to be able to buy another copy?

I would look over the usability of the checkout process, I almost didn't buy it because of the perceived ambiguity. And I would have preferred to use Paypal.

Re: Our Django Book is Launched

#126
post #4

So, full disclaimer: I was one of the editors of this book. This is a really great 'best practices' book for Django developers of all skill levels. In the Django community, there are a variety of practices that people tend to use: webapp structure, coding conventions, library preferences, etc. As a Django developer, finding out 'which way should I do X' is often harder than it seems: there are tons of articles on Goo…

Having recently started Django for a small gig, I have found searching for Django documentation, tips, and practices, to be extremely difficult and confusing, especially coming from the Rails world where blog posts seem a dime a dozen. I spent a long time looking for good info only to find outdated or poorly maintained docs, and a very little sense of "community". I'll probably grab this book to get me jumpstarted. I…

This is really surprising to hear. I think Django has some of the best documentation out there. I rarely have to go to blogs or Stack Overflow because that answer usually exists right in the docs.

Could you give an example or two of issues you had that you couldn't find the answer to in the docs?

Re: Our Django Book is Launched

#127
post #29

One of my big concerns is user / session security. I have tried to follow and reason through discussions on stackoverflow and much of tpatchek's notes. I would be interested in how "high level" the security chapter is from anyone who has shelled out already. For example I assume I will 1. only use persona or openid (avoids storing passwords in my servers thus making a lot of things much much easier) 2. sessions - sto…

Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors. The book covers 7 pages that gets you started down the road of understanding security. We provide you the stuff you have to know, and point you towards better resources. Keep in mind we aren't professional security experts. If your site needs to be that secure, the best thing you can do is to hire the services of a carefully vetted security expert.

Is this book going to be finished any time soon, or will it sit in the 'Alpha' state until you guys need more money? (cough John Resig cough)

Re: Our Django Book is Launched

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 on payment options. As someone with a British credit card, the site won't verify my card (I suspect I need to be able to put my name as per card and address on it). So much for being able to buy it :(

I was able to use my HSBC Visa Debit card - there was no verification though - payment just went straight through.

Uh oh, I'm on exactly the same card … wonder what that's about :/

Re: Our Django Book is Launched

#129
Feedback from a 4 month newbie: I've read several chapters. Overall the book is great but I have some specific suggestions, which I'll wrap in the context of what my biggest barriers to learning Django and web development have been.

Background: I starting learning web development with Django 4 months ago. I knew nothing but procedural programming (from late 80s) and a little CSS (Wordpress) before starting. I did Learn Python the Hard Way for a week then dove in.

Barriers to learning Django and Web dev:

1) Setting up the development and production environments has taken up at least 1/3 of my last 4 months of learning. This book would have helped with that significantly.

Suggestion 1: It would help even more if, in addition to your sample setup on github, there was a virtual machine or Vagrant file intended for beginners to get up and running quickly.

I've developed a VMware VM for myself along these lines (based on bitnami's Django stack on top of Ubuntu 12.04) and will use your book to improve it - especially changing my project layout template.

Suggestions 2: Answer a specific question the book didn't address: Is a virtual machine (one per project) a fine alternative to using virtualenv? If not, why not?

2) Django docs do a great job telling me what each command does, but rarely which of many alternatives is best to use (and why), and how best to structure projects. So I end up doing hours of searching each week (Google, Stack Overflow). This is where Two Scoops really nails it - would have shaved at least 2 weeks off my 4 months learning time. [can use this as a direct quote on your site, if you like]

Suggestion 3: Chapter 4 talks about keeping apps small and loosely coupled but not how to bind multiple reusable apps together, especially ones where tight coupling seems natural. I know there are techniques for this but I don't know which is best.

Suggestion 4: Chapter 6 briefly discusses when to drop down to SQL. Would love to see this expanded to several pages, with perhaps a long list of common situations where it does make sense to drop down to SQL. Either that, or a link to an excellent external resource.

3) Django is a tour de force in OOP. If you're weak on OOP, the tutorial and most other parts of Django is tough going. Practice and learning how to use my IDE (PyCharm) to navigate code eventually got me over this hurdle. This is not something addressed by your book, which is fine.

Suggestion 5: In Before You Begin section, perhaps add a single sentence that urges beginners to learn Python and (importantly) OOP before starting the Django tutorial.

4) No Django doc clearly explains the basic concept of web pages with no state, but context passed around to keep track of things. I still don't 100% understand why there are so many different ways of dealing with context, and which Django commands are best for given situations. Not currently in your book and maybe it doesn't fit in. But just want to mention that this was, and continues to be, a hurdle.

5) Deployment is way too hard for a beginner. I'm using dotcloud so that made it easier but again - having a virtual machine for distribution to beginners would be super helpful.

Suggestion 6: Expand chapter on deployment.

6) Would love to see an entire book devoted to building a single, substantial project that did a lot of typical things, but with all best practices implemented and explained in context. The project would use 2-3 existing Django apps and create 2-3 additional ones from scratch, and would show how to have intermediate apps to tie together 2 apps that need tight coupling. It would show this apps environments of dev, testing, staging, and deployment on either dotcloud, heroku, or gondor.io. It would show how to make the app look reasonably attractive, perhaps using Zurb or Twitter Bootstrap. I think this would make a terrific companion book to Two Scoops.

Hope some of this is helpful. Thanks for writing this book! I've had it for less than a day and I've already learned a lot.

Re: Our Django Book is Launched

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 on payment options. As someone with a British credit card, the site won't verify my card (I suspect I need to be able to put my name as per card and address on it). So much for being able to buy it :(

I was able to use my HSBC Visa Debit card - there was no verification though - payment just went straight through.

Had to go speak to my bank, turns out that Gumroad came up as fraud and HSBC froze my entire account! The bank said it should work now but I'm pretty put off.
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