Structure of the Book

I’ve broken the book up into two parts:

• PART 1: Fundamentals—A high-level overview of Django, how it’s structured, and its core components so you can grasp how Django brings together each element to create powerful and scalable web applications.
• PART 2: Essentials—This is the meaty middle of the book where we take a deep and detailed dive into the core modules of Django so you can gain a thorough and practical understanding of all the most commonly used modules in Django.

Throughout the book, I will use snippets of code from a fictitious website for a social or sporting club called MyClub.

It was my original plan for this book to end up with a complete website for MyClub. However, it was apparent halfway through that a book that teaches you as much as possible about the popular parts of Django has very different goals to a book that teaches you how to create a complex, professional website.

In the latter case, no more so than the need to write tests. Tests, while necessary for developing a professional application, distract from learning the core functions of Django. If I wrote proper tests for all the code in this book, I would double the size of the codebase and add little to your learning. For these reasons, I have kept the code in this book to illustrative snippets.