Pro Django, 2nd Edition.pdf

Code alone isn’t enough. Sure, it’s what the computer runs, but code has to come from somewhere. A programmer has to sit down and decide what features to include, how they should be implemented, what other software to utilize, and how to provide hooks for future enhancements to be added. It’s easy to skip straight to code, ignoring the cognitive process that produces it, but great programmers always have reasons for the decisions they make. With a framework, like Django, many such decisions have already been made, and the tools provided are shaped by these decisions, and by the programmers who made them. By adopting these philosophies in your own code, not only will you be consistent with Django and other applications, but you may even be amazed at what you’re able to accomplish. Beneath even the simplest code is the thought process that went into its creation. Decisions were made about what it should do and how it should do it. This thought process is a step often overlooked in books and manuals, leading to an army of technicians slaving away, writing code that manages to accomplish the task at hand but without a vision for its future. While the rest of this book will explain in detail the many basic building blocks Django provides for even the most complicated of projects, this chapter will focus on even more fundamental aspects of the framework. For those readers coming from other backgrounds, the ideas presented in this chapter may seem considerably foreign, but that doesn’t make them any less important. All programmers working with Python and Django would do well to have a solid understanding of the reasons Django works the way it does, and how those principles can be applied to other projects. You may want to read this chapter more than once, and perhaps refer to it often as you work with Django. Many of the topics are common knowledge in the Django community, so reading this chapter carefully is essential if you plan to interact with other programmers.