I picked up Practical Django Projects by James Bennett just the other day. The book walks through the building of a few different projects, and tries to lead you down the path of “best practices” along the way. However, the book’s publisher decided to release the first edition of this book on the heels of the Django 1.0 release, and the book is specific to pre-1.0 versions of Django.
If you’re kinda new to Django, you’re likely to be lost. I had only done a couple of really simple tutorial projects before picking up this book, and was really unnerved when I hit a seemingly impossible obstacle on page 24 — the dreaded TinyMCE integration. At that point in the book, it starts to become really obvious that this is not a 1.0-compliant Django book.
If you’re having trouble with this book and you’re using Django 1.0, I can give you two tips that are saving my bacon as I work through these bumps:
- Go to the porting guide for 1.0, read it, and bookmark it. Better yet, just leave it open in your browser all the time.
- For the TinyMCE issue, there’s more than one possible issue — but if your development server is giving you 404s after doing a redirect (302) trying to find the tiny_mce.js file, move the relevant line in the URLConf up. The redirect is a hint that your url didn’t match anything.
The porting guide fixes at least 3 issues in the book by page 40.
Also, if you’re a django n00b looking for help, I started a #django-newbie IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Come join us!