On: OReilly offers 50% discount on ebooks in celebrati...

[route3]

Slightly off-topic observation:

2 results for: django > Books

46 results for: rails > Books

Can anyone speak to the demand, or lack thereof, for Django books and educational material? Do large(r) technical publishers not see a viable market for Django books?

I read Two Scoops Of Django (on vacation, no less) and would love to see more books on Django best practices.

[mynegation → route3]

I wonder if this has to deal with some external factors, like availability of a good free book (often times from the makers), or volatility of APIs.

Having said that, for a long time I have been evaluating popularity, risk of adoption, and job market impact of technologies using the number of O'Reilly books and videos published on the subject as a crude measure.

[awj → mynegation]

> I wonder if this has to deal with some external factors, like availability of a good free book

The Django documentation is absolutely fantastic[1]. It and PostgreSQL are my personal gold standards for documentation.

[1] At least from my experience playing with it. I have not tried to use Django in anger, but it feels like the docs will hold up well.

[smackay → awj]

My only criticism of the Django docs is that every sentence has equal weight. That makes it difficult for someone starting out to distinguish between things that are absolutely critical and those that just nice to know. However once you are up and running they are great but they do need re-reading for the same reason.

[smackfu → route3]

They definitely don't have any Django books, but the Rails count is a little exaggerated there. e-books and print are listed as separate entries, there are a lot of "mini" e-books, and some of the Rails books are from 2007 and are surely pretty useless now.

[parnas → route3]

says more about overproduction of Rails books then it does about lack of Django...

[raverbashing → route3]

Yes, this is interesting.

When I learned Django, the existing books were, how can I put it, awful. Really

Sorry, but the ones that were "recommended" to me had no sense of a learning curve whatsoever. I was left frustrated by them, thinking I would never learn this.

And beyond the Django tutorial on the site, you're left all by yourself.

2SoD is good, but it's a book for advanced users.

It is really a sad situation.

[stmchn → raverbashing]

To be fair, Django has excellent documentation and a great online community of bloggers and people to poke with questions. I've rarely come to a situation where I was truly off on my own. Although, yeah, I would love to see more Django books out there.

[raverbashing → stmchn]

Yes, the documentation is very good, what confuses people is what to look up (if you don't know where to look) or in what order to learn things.

[absconditus → route3]

Perform a job search for the same two topics.

[alexakarpov → route3]

I just got 'Test-driven web development with Python" from this sale. Django feels awesome! Got 'Two Scoops", too =P