the onda

The best technical books are bits of "frozen wisdom" that can definitely be acquired with enough time and experience. But we evolved from monkeys thanks to our ability to abstract and to learn, so why bother?

"The Definitive Guide to Django" by Adrian and Jacob is a particularly juicy bit of frozen wisdom. As I flipped through its pages today, I recognized so many nuggets that we at Tabblo learned the hard way, which is to say with a mix of the online docs, reading the source, and trial-and-error, as well as a bunch of stuff that I know very little about (internationalization, the admin interface) but am eager to learn.

Just this week in fact, I was futzing with the code on this blog and needed to do something with generic views to further filter my querysets. Though I felt incredibly creative (and Pythonic) in my solution (wrapping the generic view function), I couldn't help but chuckle at the fact that it is part of the "best practices" recommended in the book.

Frameworks like Django are the mortar we web folk use to build our castles in the sky. Like great typography, they should be mostly invisible, supporting the applications built with them. However, Django is great mortar— as everyone at Tabblo will attest— so if you're planning to use it, make sure to get a copy of this book.

Postnote: Our very own Ned Batchelder even makes an appearance in the case studies section, sounding much wiser than the Ned that lost this great burrito t-shirt to a bet...