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Copyright Ā© 2016 Nigel George
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: December 2016
Production reference: 1291116
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham
B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78728-114-1
www.packtpub.com
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Nigel George is a business systems developer who specializes in the application of open source technologies to solve common business problems. He has a broad range of experience in software developmentāfrom writing database apps for small business to developing the back end and UI for a distributed sensor network at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Nigel also has over 15 years experience in technical writing for business. He has written several training manuals and hundreds of technical procedures for corporations and Australian government departments. He has been using Django since version 0.96 and has written applications in C, C#, C++, VB, VBA, HTML, JavaScript, Python and PHP.
He has another book on DjangoāBeginning Django CMSāpublished by Apress in December 2015.
Nigel lives in Newcastle, NSW, Australia.
First and foremost, I would like to thank the original authors of the Django Book-Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss. They provided such a strong foundation that it has really been a delight writing this new edition.
Equal first in the shout out has to be the Django community. Vibrant and collaborative, the Django community is what really stood out to this cynical old businessman many years ago when I first discovered the ānew kid on the webframework blockā. Itās your support that makes Django so great. Thank you.
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What you need for this book
Required programming knowledge
Readers of this book should understand the basics of procedural and object-oriented programming: control structures (such as if, while, or for), data structures (lists, hashes/dictionaries), variables, classes, and objects. Experience in web development is, as you may expect, very helpful, but it is not required to understand this book. Throughout the book, I try to promote best practices in web development for readers who lack this experience.
Required Python knowledge
At its core, Django is simply a collection of libraries written in the Python programming language. To develop a site using Django, you write Python code that uses these libraries. Learning Django, then, is a matter of learning how to program in Python and understanding how the Django libraries work. If you have experience programming in Python, you should have no trouble diving in. By and large, the Django code doesn't perform a lot of magic (that is, programming trickery whose implementation is difficult to explain or understand). For you, learning Django will be a matter of learning Django's conventions and APIs.
If you don't have experience programming in Python, you're in for a treat. It's easy to learn and a joy to use! Although this book doesn't include a full Python tutorial, it highlights Python features and functionality where appropriate, particularly when code doesn't immediately make sense. Still, I recommend you read the official Python tutorial (for more information visit http://docs.python.org/tut/). I also recommend Mark Pilgrim's free book Dive Into Python, available online at http://www.diveintopython.net/ and published in print by Apress.
Required Django version
This book covers Django 1.8 LTS. This is the long term support version of Django, with full support until at least April 2018.
If you have an early version of Django, it is recommended that you upgrade to the latest version of Django 1.8 LTS. At the time of printing (July 2016), the most current production version of Django 1.8 LTS is 1.8.13.
If you have installed a later version of Django, please note that while Django's developers maintain backwards compatibility as much as possible, some backwards incompatible changes do get introduced occasionally. The changes in each release are always covered in the release notes, which you can find at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/.
For any queries visit: http://masteringdjango.com.
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This book assumes you have a basic understanding of the Internet and programming. Experience with Python or Django would be an advantage, but is not necessary. It is ideal f...
