> Not to be so unreasonably negative here, but I've been pretty suspicious of the peculiar amount of attention this book has gotten.
What makes you suspicious? I like TSoD because it fills that gap between the official docs and SO/mailing lists: it's a collection of "best practice" advice for those who have already had exposure to Django.
It's a completely different approach from the Django Book, and I don't think this is a problem. They are targeting different demographics.
Absolutely. They are very different. The Django Book is a tutorial--very useful, and I do wish that it got more support. I will have to see what I can do with helping to update it for Django 1.5.
But TSoD is a different animal--it's not a "How to learn Django" guide, it's a "How to use Django in the real world" guide. It's not teaching you how to setup models and forms, it's the step beyond that--once you know how to use it, how do you use it well, in production environments? Things that most decent Django programmers know, but that are very hard for those just getting started to figure out except through trial, error, and hours of Googling. There's a big gap in literature here, and not just for Django. I'm happy to see someone addressing it.
Thanks for mentioning that! I'm just getting into Django, and a friend recommended getting TSoD, and it's been pretty spectacularly unhelpful for actually learning how to do the basics like deployment (though I could see how it would be useful for clearing up bad habits). The Django book looks absolutely fantastic for learning the basics, better than most commercial software books I've read in the past. Wonder why they don't point to it explicitly in the Django docs tutorial.
Edit: Never mind - while it's good, I've already run into a couple areas where it seems to be severely outdated, so I could see why it wouldn't be advertised too heavily.
We've gone back and forth on how much to put in the deployment chapter. Our concern is that deployment is one of those areas that has very good documentation, is discussed frequently at meetup groups, and best practices actually change more frequently than people realize. For example, many people got on our case about not including uWSGI or even bothering to include Apache!
In any case, I would love to hear your feedback on other areas.
Hey, thanks for responding. Sorry if the tone came across as harsh at all, it's quite good, it's just not the sort of book I was expecting. I was hoping it was a more comprehensive A-Z sort of book to learn the surface of everything it takes to get started, like "Agile Web Development with Rails" by Dave Thomas and DHH was for Rails, or the Django Book seems to be for early versions of Django.
What makes you suspicious? I like TSoD because it fills that gap between the official docs and SO/mailing lists: it's a collection of "best practice" advice for those who have already had exposure to Django.
It's a completely different approach from the Django Book, and I don't think this is a problem. They are targeting different demographics.