+++
title = "Web Development with Django Cookbook - Aidas Bendoraitis"
date = 2016-07-10

category = "review"

[taxonomies]
tags = ["books", "en-au", "aidas bendoraitis"]
+++
{{ stars(stars=1) }}

First point: This book is terribly outdated. It focus on Django 1.6, which is at least 3 versions behind the current one (at the time of this review). 1.6 is so old that you can't find its documentation on the Django Project page anymore.

Second point: This book is terrible. I mean, one of the very first examples it talks about a mixin with creation date and modified date, which is pretty damn easy with Django, but instead of using "auto_now=True" and/or "auto_now_add=True", it overrides save() on the model. Now terrible enough? Later in the book, it creates a templatetag to access model directly, which completely obliterates the MVT (model-view-template) model of Django. Still not terrible enough? Again in the very first part of the book, to prevent browser caching issues, it gives a recipe for using the SVN revision in the static path; the wrong part of it is: a) it means you'll have to have SVN in your server instead of using proper setup.py to deliver your apps, b) it does a system() call, which is slow, c) there is a prop in SVN which allows you to use "$Id$" to automatically save the revision on commit (pretty much like CSV) and d) If you're having caching issues, that's a problem with your webserver, not Django.

(I won't even talk about long chapters talking about MPTT with examples either don't show the tool properly or MPTT is so useless one could replace it with a single ForeignKey.)

The whole book feels like someone searched for "django" on StackOverflow and dropped the first answers.

In the end, the book is only good for giving you some ideas of what is available with Django, not how to properly develop a Django app.