Last month I got an email from Packt telling me about their latest book on Django Template development. I was invited to give it a read and see how I liked it.

Now, I'm a lazy and slow reader. But this book was quite an easy read. I liked how fast I went through the pages and how friendly the writer seemed :) .

This is a book focused on Django templates, not in Django itself, but through out the book it becomes obvious that you'll always need to have basic knowledge on how views and urls work.

My first impression of the book was a bit of disappointment since it's a Django 1.0 book, but there hasn't really been any #fixed-the-join-filter-s-escaping-behavior">big changes in Django 1.1 that would affect the book. So the book is still valid ;) .

Highlights

The chapters that I found most useful were "Chapter 5: Loading and inheriting Templates" (I would have liked someone telling me about inheriting best practices when I started), "Chapter 6: Serving Multiple Templates" (great use case of the mobile site :) ) and "Chapter 9:Customizing the Admin Look and Feel" (Found it easier to read than the actual #overriding-admin-templates">Django documentation on the subject), I was pretty interested on chapter 11 about Internationalization, but it felt a tad too short.

Missing?

I don't know if I missed this part when reading but I think it would have been good to address the fact that a template is a list of nodes and each of these nodes has to be rendered. It's mentioned when teaching you how to create your own template tag, but I feel this could have been explained a little bit further to have knowledge on how the templating system works.

Here in Aureal we work with two Web designers, they don't do any code. They just help us making the HTML look pretty and one of their biggest issues is with forms, we lazy coders like to print the default table format {{my_form}}. German and Justina always have a hard time figuring out what's behind that form, what attribues are in it, why is it a table, hwo to change that and all that... I was expecting the book to have an extra chapter on that but I never found it :( .

Overall

The book is a great introduction to templates best practices and even after working heavily with Django you might learn a trick or two from it.

Comments

#300685" title="2009-08-28 00:32:31">geo: Maybe your designers could learn to use the templates. It's a minimum overhead.

#370882" title="2011-07-27 04:40:00">sdafd: {% endfor %}