Django for Beginners

This edition, revised in May 2023 to cover Django 4.2, walks readers through building five practical Python web applications from start to finish. Along the way it covers the core parts of Django, including models and the ORM, views, templates, settings, forms, authentication, and middleware. Each project comes with its own tests, and the book shows how to keep secrets out of code by using environment variables.

Readers also learn to put finished sites online and to switch between a local development setup and a live production one. The book builds custom signup, login, logout, password change, and password reset features, and shows how to add well-known third-party Django packages to extend an app's functionality. The course is organized as a series of chapters that move from initial setup and a simple hello world app through a pages app, a message board, a blog, a newspaper site, and comments, ending with deployment.

It is aimed at people who already know basic Python and at programmers who are moving to Django from another web framework. The author presents current best practices in a brisk, hands-on style.