Web Development with Django

Learn how to create your own websites easily, securely, and quickly with Django by tackling practical activities based on realistic case studies.

Key Features

• Understand Django functionality and the Model-View-Template (MVT) paradigm
• Create and iteratively build a book review website, adding features as you build your knowledge
• Explore advanced concepts such as REST API implementation and third-party module integration

Book Description

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications which stand out from the crowd, rather than spending hours on boilerplate code? Then Django framework is where you should begin. Often referred to as a 'batteries included' web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application.

Web Development with Django takes this philosophy and equips you with the knowledge and confidence to build real-world applications using Python.

This book starts with the essential concepts necessary to learn Django. Then we cover its major features by building a website called Bookr - a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects that are presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way.

As you progress further, you'll learn various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. Throughout this book, you'll cover daily key tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application.

By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively develop and deploy your own projects with Django.

What you will learn

• Create a new application and add models to describe your data
• Use views and templates to control behavior and appearance
• Implement access control through authentication and permissions
• Develop practical web forms to add features such as file uploads
• Learn to develop a RESTful API and JavaScript code that communicates with it
• Connect to a database such as PostgreSQL

Who This Book Is For

Programmers looking to enhance their web development skills using the Django framework. To fully understand the concepts explained in this book, basic knowledge of Python programming, as well as familiarity with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS is assumed.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Django
2. Models and Migrations
3. URL Mapping, Views, and Templates
4. Django Admin Introduction
5. Serving Static Files
6. Forms
7. Validating Forms
8. File Uploads/Media Serving
9. Sessions and Authentication
10. Advanced Django Admin and Customisation
11. Advanced Templating (including Custom Template Tags/Filters), Class Based Views(CBV)
12. Building a REST API
13. Generating CSV, PDF and other binary files
14. Testing
15. Plugging in 3rd Party Libraries
16. Using A Frontend JS Library to Communicate with REST API
17. Deploying a Django Application using Docker