Django 4 By Example: Build powerful and reliable Python web applications from scratch

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: A new edition of this book, updated for Django 5, is now available.

Key Features

• Implement advanced functionalities, such as full-text search engines, user activity streams, payment gateways, and recommendation engines
• Integrate JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Celery, and Memcached into your applications
• Add real-time features with Django Channels and WebSockets

Book Description

Django 4 By Example is the 4th edition of the best-selling franchise that helps you build web apps. This book will walk you through the creation of real-world applications, solving common problems, and implementing best practices using a step-by-step approach.

You'll cover a wide range of web app development topics as you build four different apps:

A blog application: Create data models, views, and URLs and implement an admin site for your blog. Create sitemaps and RSS feeds and implement a full-text search engine with PostgreSQL.

A social website: Implement authentication with Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Create user profiles, image thumbnails, a bookmarklet, and an activity stream. Implement a user follower system and add infinite scroll pagination to your website.

An e-commerce application: Build a product catalog, a shopping cart, and asynchronous tasks with Celery and RabbitMQ. Process payments with Stripe and manage payment notifications via webhooks. Build a product recommendation engine with Redis. Create PDF invoices and export orders to CSV.

An e-learning platform: Create a content management system to manage polymorphic content. Cache content with Memcached and Redis. Build and consume a RESTful API. Implement a real-time chat using WebSockets with ASGI. Create a production environment using NGINX, uWSGI and Daphne with Docker Compose.

This is a practical book that will have you creating web apps quickly.

What you will learn

• Learn Django essentials, including models, ORM, views, templates, URLs, forms, authentication, signals and middleware
• Implement different modules of the Django framework to solve specific problems
• Integrate third-party Django applications into your project
• Build asynchronous (ASGI) applications with Django
• Set up a production environment for your projects
• Easily create complex web applications to solve real use cases

Who this book is for

This book is for readers with basic Python knowledge and programmers transitioning from other web frameworks who wish to learn Django by doing. If you already use Django or have in the past, and want to learn best practices and integrate other technologies to scale your applications, then this book is for you too. This book will help you master the most relevant areas of the framework by building practical projects from scratch. Some previous knowledge of HTML and JavaScript is assumed.

Table of Contents

1. Building a Blog Application
2. Enhancing Your Blog with Advanced Features
3. Extending Your Blog Application
4. Building a Social Website
5. Implementing Social Authentication
6. Sharing Content on Your Website
7. Tracking User Actions
8. Building an Online Shop
9. Managing Payments and Orders
10. Extending Your Shop
11. Adding Internationalization to Your Shop
12. Building an E-learning Platform
13. Creating a Content Management System
14. Rendering and Caching Content
15. Building an API
16. Building a Chat Server
17. Going Live

Antonio Melé is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Nucoro, the fintech platform that allows financial institutions to build, automate, and scale digital wealth management products. Antonio is also CTO of Exo Investing, an AI-driven digital investment platform for the UK market. Antonio has been developing Django projects since 2006 for clients across several industries. In 2009 Antonio founded Zenx IT, a development company specialized in building digital products. He has been working as a CTO and technology consultant for multiple technology-based startups and he has managed development teams building projects for large digital businesses. Antonio holds an MSc. in Computer Science from ICAI - Universidad Pontificia Comillas, where he mentors early-stage startups. His father inspired his passion for computers and programming.