The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right

Welcome to the second edition of The Definitive Guide to Django, informally known as The Django Book This book aims to teach you how to use the Django Web framework to develop Web sites efficiently. When Jacob Kaplan-Moss and I wrote the first edition of this book, Django was still in a pre-1.0 stage. Once Django version 1.0 was released, with its several backward-incompatible changes, the first edition inevitably became outdated and people began demanding an update. I'm happy to report this edition covers Django 1.1 and should serve you well for some time. My thanks go to the many contributors who posted comments, corrections, and rants to, the accompanying Web site for this book, where I posted chapter drafts as I wrote them. You guys are great. Adrian Holovaty Cocreator and co-Benevolent Dictator for Life, Django xxxiii Introduction In the early days, Web developers wrote every page by hand. Updating a Web site meant ed- ing HTML; a redesign involved redoing every single page, one at a time. As Web sites grew and became more ambitious, it quickly became obvious that that situation was tedious, time-consuming, and ultimately untenable. A group of enterprising hackers at NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, was developed) solved this problem by letting the Web server spawn external programs that could generate HTML dynamically. They called this protocol the Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, and it changed the Web forever.