Django for Python Programmers

You know Python. Now build something people can open.

You can write a function, loop over a list, and read a traceback. The next thing you want to build is something other people can use, which means a web framework. You have heard of Django, opened its documentation, met the word middleware, and closed the tab.

This book starts there.

One project, from an empty directory to a live URL. You build Sidenote, a blog with a newsletter: posts, tags, cover images, comments that get moderated before they appear, a second writer allowed to draft but not publish, a confirmed-opt-in mailing list, a test suite, and a deployment. Every chapter adds to the same codebase, so you finish with one real application instead of twelve half-built tutorials in twelve folders.

Written for Django 6.1. That matters more than it usually does. Django 6.1 deprecated a set of patterns almost every Django tutorial still teaches: bare select_related(), values_list(flat=True) with no field name, and the entire block of EMAIL_* settings, now replaced by MAILERS. Follow an older book on a fresh install and your terminal fills with warnings it cannot explain. Here you learn the current way, and you are shown the old way once, clearly labelled, because you will inherit it in somebody else's codebase.

What you will learn

• Models and migrations, including how to add a required column to a table that already has rows in it
• The ORM properly: querysets, lookups, relationships, and the N+1 query problem you will then spot by sight
• The Django admin, and the firm line where it stops being the right tool
• Templates, autoescaping, and template partials, new in Django 6
• Forms and validation, with CSRF explained rather than incanted
• Authentication, groups, and permissions, driven by one rule: Meera writes, you publish
• Email the modern way, with MAILERS and proper double opt-in
• Testing with pytest and factories, including a query-count test that finds a real bug in the book's own code
• Deployment: PostgreSQL, WhiteNoise, Gunicorn, and the first six things that will break

Assumes you can write a Python function and a class. It does not teach Python. It teaches everything web-shaped, from the raw HTTP request onwards.

15 chapters. One project. A URL at the end.