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Monday, March 28, 2011

Book Review, titled "Django Javascript Integration: AJAX and Jquery"

Review for “Django Javascript Integration: AJAX and jQuery

Author: Jonathan Hayward

The author has done a fine job of presenting a practical discussion of how to use a popular Python framework, namely Django and using another popular Javascript library, namely JQuery to develop a nice application through the chapters presented in the book. The AJAX usage within Django and client side JQuery to leverage the client-side Javascript is presented very elegantly. A simple explanation of AJAX and “how to use it” is shown earlier for an AJAX icebreaker. Later in the book the author continues to buildup the server side logic with database queries, showing how to AJAX a user interface, reduce traffic and UI churn on the front-end. The book starts walking the depth of Django and the backend framework to show the value that developers can get by using the framework. Albeit, this book is not about Python but strong understanding on Python as a programming language is strongly desired to understand all the details that are presented in the later chapters. Each chapter utilized the components that are required to build up the “Employee Photo-sharing” application that is developed during the course of the book.

I particularly liked the way the author presented details of the components when the application presented the necessity for it. The aspects of templating that Django uses and how one can plug their own templating is also touched up in the mid-chapters. Chapter 8 was a very interesting read as it explained the Django ModelForm at greater depth. It was also titled appropriately as CSS makeover.

Although the book surrounded itself around the application to bring the usage of Django and Jquery it did a decent job of covering many aspects of Django as well as Jquery. In short this book is not a dry Django tutorial but a more customized view of Django in a real-life application and the merging of JQuery to improve the application quality.

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