Sams Teach Yourself Django in 24 Hours

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Author: Brad Dayley
Format: Paperback, 528 pages
Publisher: Sams; 1st edition ( March 3, 2008 )
ISBN-10: 067232959X
ISBN-13: 978-0672329593

Review by James Pyles
July 23, 2008

I've had this book for a few months and thought it was high time to start working through my "backlog" of books sitting on the floor of my office in need of a review. The bad thing about waiting four months or so after a book has been released, is that it's already been reviewed. Nevertheless, it doesn't mean that I won't see something different in this book. Or if nothing else, I'll confirm what other reviewers have been saying about it.

Django (for those of you who don't know and are just reading this out of sheer curiosity) is "an open source web application framework, written in Python, which loosely follows the model-view-controller design pattern". At least that's how Wikipedia defines it (it's also a 1966 Italian film directed by Sergio Corbucci and an album by The Modern Jazz Quartet, first released on LP in 1956, but I digress). Before you go any further, check your bag of tricks and make sure you have at least some familiarity with the Python programming language. You're going to need it for this book to be of any use to you.

The Sams in 24 Hours books are either pretty good or pretty bad. The good part is when the author and editors can pull it off successfully, the book takes a (sometimes) complicated technology and compartmentalizes it into 24 bite-sized chunks, making it easier for the linear minded (such as me) to learn a new skill set. The bad part is when the author and editors don't pull it off, the book takes a (sometimes) complicated technology and dumbs it down to the point to where you don't really learn much but the superficial aspects. Let's see which one this turns out to be.

First things first. The author, Brad Dayley, is "a senior software engineer in Novell's Product Development Group" and "has 16 years of experience in designing, developing, and implementing software from the kernel level through web development". That would seem to qualify him to write a book of this nature (depending on what you think of Novell products, I suppose). The Introduction section tells you a few interesting things. Dayley had been working with Django for about a year and a half at the time of his writing the book. He also included only bare-bones HTML in his examples (no CSS) for the sake of space, so be prepared to do more than a little "tweaking" to get the material in this book production-environment ready.

Who should read this book? They might as well have left out this part of the intro because it states the obvious; anyone who needs to develop web apps. It even says you don't have to be very familiar with Python and refers you to www.python.org to find out what you need to learn about the language. Yikes. Well, maybe if you're an experienced programmer and web developer, that'll work. If you are a novice, I'd suggest doing something a tad more formal to get up to speed on Python before tackling Django. It's not that it's terribly complicated to set up and implement Django...just that it would be challenging for the programming newbie to learn Django from the book and Python on the fly.

Dayley teaches you how to install Django on Linux but, although it can also be installed on Windows and Mac, I didn't see explicit instructions on how to do so on those platforms (try extracting a tarball on Windows and see what happens). The instructions for the Linux install are generic. I did an sudo apt-cache search "django" on my Ubuntu machine and came back with this:

python-jinja - small but fast and easy to use stand-alone template engine
python-mako - hyperfast and lightweight templating for the Python platform
python-django - A high-level Python Web framework

When I got to Chapter 2 and started browsing over the "Try It Yourself" sections, I was a tad puzzled that the instructions seemed to be written for the Linux user, but the screen captures were from a Windows command line emulator. Also, the web browser used is obviously IE7. I went back over the intro to the book to see if there was any information about the bias for the book; that is, if the author stated he'd be using a particular OS and web browser platform. Nada. No info on that at all. You'd think a Novell developer would at least be working on SUSE and Firefox, but I can see how he'd want to appeal to the Windows users. That being the case, why weren't the installation instructions written for Windows users? I was also disappointed that there weren't at least a few notes on how some of the tasks might be different if you are using Linux or a Mac.

The book pretty much ran like that. In general, it did teach you the basic nuts and bolts of developing web apps in the Django framework, but there were just enough little errors to throw you off. Ok, they weren't serious errors. As other reviewers remarked, the code examples had issues, so minus points for both the author and the technical editor (both of whom should have tested the code) on that. Sure, the savvy developer would just look at the code, say "Aha" and fix it, but the point is, they shouldn't have to. Also, the true newbie might not know enough to be able to spot the problems and just get frustrated. The latter usually results in the book being tossed back in the closet, or worse, in the trash, and never consulted again.

That's a bit more "doom and gloom" than the book deserves. I think you can learn Django from the Dayley text, but you have to work on it a bit, and work your way around the "problem areas". Brad Dayley isn't a novice author, so I expected more out of him in this effort. He wrote the Python Phrasebook (also for SAMS), which I thought was pretty good. A quick look at his other books on Amazon told me that none of them did brilliantly in the reviews, but as an author myself, I knew that not all reviewers are particularly well informed or fair (which is why I try to be). That said and to be fair, I suspect that there are better books for learning Django out there in the world (and I think I have one or two on my "waiting list"), but if you like the "24 hours" format and tons and tons of lab examples, "Sams Teach Yourself Django in 24 Hours" isn't a bad place to start.