[deservingend]

I bought that book too. I was skeptical after reading some of the author's blog but decided to take the plunge. Just twelve bucks, so whatever. After reading it I'm certain most of those reviews are faked or the work of the author's friends.

This book is just a slideshow. The chapters are tiny, and there's very little useful content, just a bunch of "do it this way because we say so." No real justification or understanding here. Author hasn't made anything substantial with Django, and his understanding of Python itself is lacking.

People have been request a free sample chapter since the beginning, and he keeps saying that he's getting one ready. You see a free chapter, and you're much less likely to want to buy the rest.

[boolean]

For clarification, I'm not friends with the authors and learned something new in every chapter as an intermediate Django developer.

[pydanny]

First of all, there are two authors of the book, and I'm the one you are mentioning. Audrey Roy is the other one, I'm just the one who spends more time on Twitter, HN, and blogging.

In any case, thank you for this mini-review. We can't make the book better without feedback, including negative commentary. So far most of what we've gotten back has been extremely positive. While gratifying to our egos, it's the brutally honest critical reviews like yours that have given us the best information for improving the book. In fact, we ask for honesty in reviews of our work, and are willing to take soul-crushing criticism so we can improve it.

As for the existing reviews, with the possible exception of Barry Morrison, they were not written by our friends. We didn't know any one besides Barry who wrote them, and his private feedback to us as a technical reviewer was pretty negative in places.

I find your point about not enough justification for our practices very interesting. We talked to a lot of core/senior Django developers about them, but I think you might have a good point that we need to explain the background. I thought we addressed this in the Beta release, and I would like to hear your feelings about that version.

Some more points:

The chapters seem tiny because we self-published and there is no fluff. This time I didn't have a publisher telling us, "This chapter needs 20 pages of content, add some more content!". This happens to book authors working with mainstream publishers, which is why tech books are often so thick and heavy and sit mostly unread on shelves. Instead, because we controlled the book 100% each chapter is as long as the material needs to be. Hence your feeling that this is 'light-reading', even though it has as much content and code examples as a thicker, denser book.

What do you consider substantial with Django? Should I have built Disqus, Mozilla, Pinterest, or Instagram on my own? Or is there some other level of work that I should have done? I'm curious, because unlike some people I don't hide behind a pseudonym (I'm Daniel Greenfeld and it's easy to find information about me). Unfortunately a lot of the work I've done for the past 18 months is in private github accounts. This really sucks, and I hope to fix it this year.

As for my actual Python and Django skills, I'm humble enough to acknowledge that I can always learn more. This is part of why I worked so hard on the Django CBV documentation refactor in 2012 (especially the reference docs), to expand my own knowledge of them. The day I call myself the absolute authority is the day I stop improving, and I apply this to everything I do. In fact, I used to give a talk on this exact topic. ;-)

Finally, as for the free chapter, here goes: Since the book was released in Alpha and Beta states, we want our book in a perfect state. This is why we offered the book at a discount (O'Reilly and other mainstream publishers do the same), so early adopters could try it out and provide feedback and we could get paid for our hundreds of hours of work. In return for the early adopter discount, you and many others have given us useful feedback (not enough justification for our practices), and now we can improve.

[andy_boot]

I enjoyed two scoops. I appreciated the terseness of it.

If I had one criticism it would be the 'do it this way' style felt a little strong. I would have liked to see a 'some people dont do it this way' star on some of your coding style choices.

I'd quite like to hear about how you marketed it - I seemed to hear about the book from multiple sources all at once - you clearly did a good job there.

[pydanny]

Any suggestions about what coding style choices you think should have alternates?

As for marketing, we hit HN, blog, twitter, and linkin. Then the word spread and we found it in other places. It was pretty awesome. We can't wait for it to get on Amazon. :-)

[dartdog]

I have read the book and I am a friend,, so I guess I'm not "qualified" but I did find the book very useful, I have it on my to do to write a full review and it will be very positive, because the material is that good. It has given me some good tips and inspired me to get on with doings some stuff I had just been too lazy to get on with. I too stand by mys stuff and while I have a Pseudonym (dartdog) I can be easily found it is not something I hid behind. Danny, it is good work, don't let one unknown, unqualified, jerk get you down!

[simeonf]

This is just stupid. I haven't bought the book, I haven't read it (I don't know pydanny personally), but I teach Python and Django courses. My Django courseware has several shoutouts to best practices I got from pydanny, uses crispy-forms of which he is the godfather, etc. I see one sentence of valuable review and two paragraphs of trolling.