The folks at Packt Publishing sent me a copy of Learning Website Development with Django by Ayman Hourieh. It’s a fairly thin book, weighing in at just 243 pages, but it it is a very good introduction to Django. Knowledge of Python is assumed, so if you need that information, you’ll need another book. Hourieh uses a running example, a social bookmarking application, throughout the book. This means that he is adding features to the application in each chapter, which is a style that I like because it shows how to use Django to build up a decently featured application piece by piece. There is lots of code, which I found easy to read, except for some places where the bold facing of new code was somehow omitted.
The only problem with the book was that it was finished before Django went 1.0, so there are undoubtedly some places where things are not quite in sync with Django 1.0. Hourieh did make an effort to deal with some of the largest 1.0 changes, like newforms, but omitted other like Unicode support. This is inevitable when the book and software are not in sync, but since Django only went 1.0 a few weeks ago, the only documentation that is completely up to date is the official Django documentation itself.
If you know Python and for some reason have been holding off on learning Django, this is a good book to help you get started. There is also an e-book version available via Packt’s website.
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