February 17th, 2013

We Met Four Years Ago Today!

We met at PyCon 2010 in Atlanta on February 17, 2010. Our life together has been wonderful ever since. On Daniel's blog is a recap of how we met and the days that followed.

Two Scoops of Django 1.6 is a #1 Python Best Seller!

On her blog, Audrey Roy covers the success of Two Scoops of Django 1.6 on Amazon. A week since launch, some hours we're #1 and other hours Mark Lutz's famous Learning Python is in the lead.

Our 1.6 edition will be the last ever update to Two Scoops of Django (see our FAQ). It's greatly expanded and full of good stuff.

Jason Meridth Wins the Gelato Contest!

For the launch we ran a contest, with instructions slightly hidden in the long change list. Readers had to identify the location of our gelato...

One of the suggestions we received for new material for Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices for Django 1.6 was a list of links from the book. Thinking this was a good idea and worth a few pages, we decided the list could go into a new portion: 'Appendix G: Links'.

Near the end of the project I wrote a script that generated the new appendix. I generated the list and discovered even without any sort of organization besides alphabetization, the content added 12 pages. Think about that for a second...

12 pages of links.

I don't know about you, but if I bought a book with 12 pages of links I would scream 'filler'!

The decision then was to cut Appendix G from the book. It didn't survive.

Or did it?

For the sake of posterity, I've included a version of the code used to get the links out of Two Scoops. Instead...

It's our pleasure to announce that after months of research, writing, and review, Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices for Django 1.6 is in available. The result isn't just an update to the previous edition, it's a complete revision:

Here is a short list of the changes:

• Updated for Django 1.6 and designed for both Python 2.7 and 3.3.
• Over 130 pages of new material, bringing the book to 446 pages.
• Expanded sections on database transactions, binary fields, security, custom admin skins, creating and maintaining third-party packages, utilities, serialization, built-in exceptions, deployment, and more.
• 5 new chapters with material on function-based views, consuming REST APIs in templates, deployment, identical environments, and continuous integration.
• 3 new appendixes on internationalization, settings alternatives, and working with Python 3.
• More tables! Improved explanations! Corrected spellings!
• Code examples available for download.

Want to know the rest? Read the change list.

We're offering the...

Happy 2014! We have a couple of exciting announcements:

First, in case you haven't heard, Daniel and I just got married. It's not every day that co-authors of Django books get married, right?

Here was our wedding cartwheel. Photo credit: Lindy DiMaio - Della Vita Photography.

Second, the first print proof of Two Scoops of Django 1.6 arrived in the mail this week. Goodness, it is heavy! Here's how it compares to the 1.5 edition:

Note that the final version may look drastically different -- right now we are tweaking colors and making lots of edits.

In fact, it will still take several iterations before the book is ready. It may even take months. But hopefully not. Hopefully it'll be more like weeks.

The Python community has been like our family. We met through the community, and many of our dearest friendships started because of the community.

This year has been a very special year for us. We wrote Two Scoops of Django, and we started a little publishing company called Two Scoops Press. We traveled throughout Spain, Poland, Italy, and Croatia, teaching and helping local user groups. Daniel gave keynote speeches at DjangoCon Europe and EuroPython. We did a few book signings and got the chance to meet many of our book's readers.

Now we are back in Southern California, settling into our new home together and getting ready to release the next edition of our first book. We couldn't have gotten to this point without you, our friends and readers.

It is because of your feedback that we've been able to improve the next edition. We've been hard at work...