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It is good to see the book is still alive. Django is one of the best documented projects I have ever seen. But I know people who have problems with the way the

It is good to see the book is still alive. Django is one of the best documented projects I have ever seen. But I know people who have problems with the way the documentation is structured. For some parts you have to understand a completely different part of the framework to follow the documentation. This is to some degree a price you have to pay for a complex framework and is IMHO fine. But especially for those people is a book, which gives a structured way through the whole framework, a great thing.

andybak 14y ago
I don't think that's a problem to be solved by the core documentation - rather it's the role that tutorials, howto's etc solve - taking you from 'what' to 'how'. Maybe the Django docs should guide people to a few more of these before hitting them with the authoritative docs.
- thaumasiotes 14y ago
  A tutorial and a book solve completely different problems. A tutorial will only help you if you know what you want to achieve, and can therefore search for the tutorial. You read a book to find out about functionality you didn't know was there, lest you need it in the future. An organized approach to "here are all the things we do" is definitely appropriate for the core documentation.
notaddicted 14y ago
I like the django documentation but sometimes I find it hard to figure out how to do exactly what I want to do ... the source code however is pretty readable, effectively it is cross referenced since you can look at the imports, and on github you can find the tag for the version you're using and browse it online. For example, I recently re-did the login and password management pages for a site and I found it easier to just look at contrib/auth/views.py , especially since all the views are heavily parameterized, and it is only ~250 LOC: https://github.com/django/django/blob/ff6ee5f06c2850f098863d4a747069e10727293e/django/contrib/auth/views.py https://github.com/django/django/blob/ff6ee5f06c2850f098863d...

andybak 14y ago

I don't think that's a problem to be solved by the core documentation - rather it's the role that tutorials, howto's etc solve - taking you from 'what' to 'how'. Maybe the Django docs should guide people to a few more of these before hitting them with the authoritative docs.

thaumasiotes 14y ago
A tutorial and a book solve completely different problems. A tutorial will only help you if you know what you want to achieve, and can therefore search for the tutorial. You read a book to find out about functionality you didn't know was there, lest you need it in the future. An organized approach to "here are all the things we do" is definitely appropriate for the core documentation.

notaddicted 14y ago

I like the django documentation but sometimes I find it hard to figure out how to do exactly what I want to do ... the source code however is pretty readable, effectively it is cross referenced since you can look at the imports, and on github you can find the tag for the version you're using and browse it online. For example, I recently re-did the login and password management pages for a site and I found it easier to just look at contrib/auth/views.py , especially since all the views are heavily parameterized, and it is only ~250 LOC: https://github.com/django/django/blob/ff6ee5f06c2850f098863d4a747069e10727293e/django/contrib/auth/views.py https://github.com/django/django/blob/ff6ee5f06c2850f098863d...