
Announcing Two Scoops of Django 1.6 - jpdlla
http://pydanny.com/announcing-two-scoops-of-django-1.6.html
======
lawnchair_larry
Dead-tree edition exclusive is the most draconian DRM of them all in 2014. I
bought the first, but won't be a customer anymore. I'm also surprised it's a
full price upgrade so soon.

~~~
walkon
I do agree that the current price seems a bit high, but there are significant
changes from the first edition:

[http://twoscoopspress.com/pages/two-scoops-of-
django-1-6-cha...](http://twoscoopspress.com/pages/two-scoops-of-
django-1-6-change-list)

In the comments of the announcement, PyDanny lists their reasons why they
skipped an ebook format this time:

\- _The print version of Two Scoops of Django 1.5 has been by far the most
popular version of the book with readers, selling several times more than the
e-books. In addition, the feedback we 've gotten has been that technical books
are generally better to have in print than as an ebook._

\- _Creating and proofing each ebook format is not a trivial effort. It
involves reformatting every code sample to work on every ebook reader,
accounting for differences in screen contrast, accessibility testing, and
proofreading the text and code samples several times on each device. Instead
of spending our time struggling with reformatting, we 're choosing to focus on
improving the technical material._

\- _Considering that we publicly offered a free electronic copy to those who
requested it, seeing piracy of the electronic editions from the first day of
sales has been disheartening. As indie authors, it hurts to see this
happening._

They can't produce a digital edition without extra cost and it would be
frustrating to make that investment only to see people immediately circulating
copies. Yes, they'll loose readers, but they've estimated that is an
acceptable trade off at this time.

~~~
jemeshsu
If epub formatting is a problem, they can actually release a PDF version.

They probably not realise that printed book also can be pirated. Someone will
painstakingly scan the book into PDF.

~~~
walkon
Good point on the PDF version, especially if Amazon allows PDF sales (instead
a Kindle version). I am a bit surprised that pirating was a significant issue
with the first book. Didn't they offer free or discounted versions if people
requested they didn't have the money? If so, that might have gave people the
impression that passing around copies wasn't a concern of the authors.

------
cschmidt
I loved the 1.5 version, and just ordered the new version. If Pydanny or
Audrey stops by to read this, I have a suggestion.

You two should write a book aimed at someone entirely new to Django. I've seen
your book often recommended as the second book on Django you should read.
However, there isn't a good first book that isn't very outdated. How about
"One Scoop of Django", as an intro for someone brand new to Django? Perhaps
more example based, but still with your fun style. Or you could expand your
current book with some new chapters.

Thanks!

~~~
acjohnson55
I think the actual Django manual _is_ One Scoop, at least if you already have
a basic understanding of webdev and Python. It's fantastically well written. I
downloaded the PDF version and read it pretty much cover to cover to learn
Django. To me, Two Scoops picks up right where the manual leaves off. Maybe
the biggest problem is that the manual maybe doesn't present itself as totally
valid linear resource.

~~~
cschmidt
It is a great resource, but it is getting out of date. They even have a
disclaimer on that page [1] now:

    
    
        While the book mentions Django version 1.4 in places, 
        the vast majority of the book is for Django version 1.0, 
        which was released over four years ago. 
    
        Therefore this resource is extremely out of date and, 
        until the book is finished being updated, we ask that, 
        at this time, djangobook.com not be used for educational purposes.
    

That matters most to a beginner. If you're following along at home with Django
1.6, and the code doesn't work like it says, then you're stuck.

[1]
[http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/index.html](http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/index.html)

~~~
neokya
I think he is talking about this
[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/intro/tutorial01/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/intro/tutorial01/)

Indeed, it is One Scoop of Django

------
mikehearn
Just to add to the HN echo chamber, I bought and love the 1.5 ebook, but the
lack of a digital version for this new edition means I won't be updating. When
I am building new projects I often find myself using ctrl+F to search for
specific mentions of variables or settings. A print book adds "stuff" to my
life, gives me another thing to carry between work and home, and makes it
harder for me to find the information I need. But I understand that as a
member of the minority (i.e. ebook purchasers) I am in a strategically
disadvantaged position and accept that. I can live without it.

------
zachwill
Kind of shocked they won't be offering a Kindle version. I was a big fan of
the 1.5 edition.

~~~
ashray
No digital version ? I think that's absolutely ridiculous!

I read their reasons for not having one but lets be honest, this is a book for
programmers ? And it doesn't have a digital version ? Someone's clearly lost
the plot here!

I supported the previous edition of the book since the beta version. I'm a
digital nomad, I work all over the world, I'm not about to lug a 446 page
django book with me wherever I go.

There are several developers who like to search for and bookmark stuff in
their ebooks. Now it's impossible to Ctrl+F.

Some of us like to read on the train or like to read on different platforms
(kindle/ipad/iphone/android/etc).

I recommended the first version of this book to several fellow django
programmers. Unfortunately I am really disappointed by this print-only
decision. The fact that piracy was a reason for it disheartens me even more.

I guess these guys have never heard of anyone scanning in a physical book and
sharing PDFs over the internet. Providing a print only version will just hurt
legitimate customers, the pirates are still gonna pirate :( I can count down
the days that this shows up on the pirate bay.

As for the fact that "The print version sold the most". Well, were the print
people supporting your book while you were in beta releasing new versions
every week ? Did they give you feedback on how good/bad the content was ?

Seriously guys, your next book should be about "How not to do programming
books".

~~~
FireBeyond
Yeah. Fairly disappointed. I just paid print+epub version of "Two Scoops of
Django 1.5" very recently, and now out comes this. Not saying that I should
get a free copy, no. But I don't have a choice but to pay another $40.

(Not that I -have- to.)

------
sonar_un
Funny how I said to pydanny (on Reddit) a couple days ago that i'd buy the new
Two Scoops as soon as it came out. Little did I know that it would not be a
digital release.

In the conversation, pydanny did mention that nearly everything in Two Scoops
1.5 should apply to 1.6, and it does (as I went through the book with a fresh
1.6 install). So for those of you contemplating the books for current use, I'd
say, go ahead!

You can definitely count me out for this new version of Two Scoops, I have no
need for a print copy of any programming book. I just recycled some old PHP
and Javascript books I had laying around for years unused. It seems useless to
me that in 2014 we'd forgo printing this kind of book when the coding and
reading/learning are happening on the same screen.

So thanks pydanny for Two Scoops, but I've unsubscribed from your mailing
lists and will be opting out of this release.

~~~
jayfehr
Yeah, I think people just pretty much assume that a programming book would
have a digital version these days.

------
throne
Bought 1.5 ebook, received email about 1.6, no mention of "no ebook" anywhere
in email. Found FAQ. Lists reasons why "no ebook" is best for them, not their
customers.

I like supporting authors, but not by buying paper books. O'Reilly and PragPub
have figured this out which is why I support them.

Edit: Wow, three emails to the list of folks who bought the ebook version of
1.5. The third to email the entire faq out. Self publishing apparently isn't
for everyone.

------
ylem
Here, there are two pain points--one is that this is a "minor" version change
of the core library and the second is that there is no electronic version. If
there were an electronic version, I would still buy it, but it's not worth it
for the shelf space...I would recommend the earlier version to people, it was
an excellent resource. Reading their explanation, perhaps if they just
provided a pdf?

~~~
doughj3
I completely agree with this. I own the ebook of the last edition, but the
combination of a new edition for 1.5->1.6 and the lack of an electronic
version for the new copy is more than I'm willing to swallow. Here's to hoping
the authors change their mind...

------
inglesp
I've probably recommended earlier versions of this book to everybody who uses
Django I've met in the flesh, so I may as well do so here as well.

It's been a great resource, full of years of accumulated wisdom from the
authors and the wider community.

------
porker
Maybe I misread originally, but I didn't expect to have to buy a new ebook to
go from 1.5 -> 1.6.

I understand why the authors have decided to produce a new* book, but I don't
think they've thought about the emotional impact from a customer's
perspective.

*new for existing owners, who have to buy it all over again

~~~
acjohnson55
I would check out the page for an explanation:
[http://twoscoopspress.com/products/two-scoops-of-
django-1-6](http://twoscoopspress.com/products/two-scoops-of-django-1-6)

Basically, the book is now 1.5x the size as it was before. To me, this totally
justifies releasing a new book. Having taken a chance on the early release of
the original book and having my mind blown, I give these guys the benefit of
the doubt.

My biggest disappointment is the lack of eBook. That's how I read the first
version, and that's how I would read this version. I'd be glad to pay the
price for a physical book, but I definitely want to actually read it
electronically.

------
shuaib
Looks promising. I will wait for the Ebook though (I know authors don't plan
on releasing one, but their plan has to fail ;) ).

~~~
gatehouse
Same: can't wait to read it, wake me up when there is a pdf.

------
maciejgryka
Haven't seen this version yet, but the 1.5 edition was a great resource for
me. If you've done _something_ with Django already and are trying to improve,
this book is perfect.

------
Myrmornis
Me too, I bought the first and would not have minded paying full price for
again for an ebook of the second. It's up to the authors of course. They seem
like very nice people online so it's a shame they're getting so much
criticism. Nevertheless, here's my bit of criticism: This is obviously BS and
so a bit annoying to include: "In addition, the feedback we've gotten has been
that technical books are generally better to have in print than as an ebook."

------
akulbe
I've said as much to @pydanny already on Twitter, but I think it bears
repeating.

Piracy absolutely does exist, and it will continue. This is the ugly part of
society, that some feel entitled to steal and rob others from the fruits of
their labor. This is absolutely wrong.

That said, it's also not right to punish your honest customers by not
providing the material that they are _MORE THAN HAPPY_ to pay for - in the
medium they want.

I'm not arguing that ebook prep is easy. I'm sure it is very laborious. I have
no personal experience with this, so I will take your word for it.

That said, you deserve to be compensated for your efforts. If it's more work
to do the digital stuff, then charge enough to cover your work. Charge the
same price for digital, as you do for print.

I know that some will object. I do not. I'd be HAPPY to pay a higher than
normal price (since many publishers discount digital vs. print)

I understand your discouragement, based on previous experience. I'd be pissed
off too. That said, if I were writing, and selling it for profit... I would
welcome revenue from as many legitimate sources as I could get it from.

Like others, I've moved nearly everything in my technical library to digital
format. I don't want to carry a book, if I don't have to. There's enough in my
backpack already.

Since you currently only offer print for the new version, I bought it.

As a paying customer, who wants to support your continuing work, I hope you
will reconsider your decision to discontinue offering ebooks.

Thanks,

Aaron Kulbe

------
drdaeman
One point made me wondering. From the article:

> "for the same reasons developing on SQLite causes problems"

I've used SQLite with Django and Flask where it was appropriate option (i.e.
as a low-traffic low-volume simple database) and never had any problems. While
there are things about SQLite one certainly has to be aware of (mostly related
to the type system), I doubt SQLite causes more problems than any other RDBMS,
as every one has its own specifics and quirks.

Am I unaware of something?

EDIT: Thanks, now I get it. Misunderstood what this quote was about.

~~~
simonw
That quote is about developing and testing on SQLite but deploying on another
database such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. Unsurprisingly, doing so is likely to
result in bugs that only occur in production.

------
enscr
I bought the 1.5 version and I consider it a technically well written book.
However, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the examples (too ice-
cream centric)

In my opinion, it's better to take generic models that represent a real world
scenario that most people would be familiar with e.g. an e-commerce catalog
like Amazon's. I would have found it much enjoyable to read as compared to a
database of ice creams which sounds fun but not practically intuitive as a db.

------
code_chimp
Sorry, without an ebook I'm going to pass - I read/utilize most of my tech
books on my iPad.

I purchased the original as an ebook, and even went back and bought a physical
copy to because I thought what Dan and Audrey were doing was pretty cool. I
really don't need a second physical book, but could use an updated epub. Too
bad.

------
Ensorceled
While I'm disappointed that there is no eBook, I'd have been happy to pay full
ebook price for the upgrade, I'm more disappointed that getting the book into
Canada is going to cost almost $60US with shipping and end up being much less
useful.

------
hysan
Well no e-book (my preferred format for technical books) and no shipping to
where I live (in Asia) so, despite liking the 1.5 version, I won't be getting
the 1.6 version. Not that I have much of a choice in the matter.

------
yeukhon
Apparently, a used 2nd edition can cost $999.11?

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?ie=UTF8&field-a...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?ie=UTF8&field-
author=Daniel+Greenfeld&search-
alias=books&text=Daniel+Greenfeld&sort=relevancerank)

~~~
ericd
Pricing bots gone wild?

------
jessaustin
Perhaps the authors will do some market research here on HN? I'm not sure what
price point would get me to "repurchase" the electronic version, but I'm
unlikely to get the paper version until it's steeply discounted.

------
lazyant
Should be heavily discounted for those of us who bought the first edition

------
knappador
I'll never forget the day I had this book recommended to me. It's fortunate
that I was two-handing old-fashioned's since I have a fear of resting on best
practices akin to the way a Midway albatross fears the Pacific garbage gyre;
the ocean seems to be moving, so I'm not stuck in one place, yet the garbage
just keeps floating by, and every time I eat some, I'm a little closer to
dying.

Months later, my conclusion is that web is pretty irritating, and never call
Django MVC. Calling it MVT is kind of like waking up in front of a mirror and
realizing you've been sawing your hand off with a fork -- a rude awakening.
Think about it, templates do _absolutely nothing_ that controllers do,
nothing. MVC is convergent evolution in application programming, yet web
programming kind of doesn't have it directly.

Probably the best recommendation I can make to any web developer, is to work
in application programming. The biggest difference is in application state
persistence and the massive indirection across caches, http, databases,
sessions, message queues etc that one finds in web programming.

The second biggest difference is that instead of relying on a variety of run-
times that are supposed to match a standard, there is a single run-
time/program that has to rely on features of the OS and a lot more platform
specific deployment hoops to jump through. However, internet explorer.

History of web development: Used to, the internet was used to network
applications together. Then one day, we put the entire application on the
internet. 50% of the indirection is still geared towards networking
application instances, the whole global community part of the internet. _The
other 50% of indirection is geared towards recovering through abstraction what
is missing when doing application development._ Hybrid API architectures make
this explicit.

I'm saying that the best way, in my experience, to get better at web
development, is to work outside of web, where you find the stark lack of
indirection somewhat awesome, and when going back into the web world, all of
this indirection now speaks to me as if a kind of synesthesia where badly
arranged furniture appears to be on fire.

Not node.js, rails, meteor, flask or cold-hard gevent http servers will make
this apparent. All of web development is riddled with this indirection, top to
bottom. It's almost painful to me to be helping someone learn how to program
LAMP because I'm doing them the greatest good on their current trajectory
while 100% conscious of how all the problems they're experiencing are in
trying to pierce the indirection that is web application programming.

Let's just start calling web programming mainframe programming with soft
client terminals in virtual machines called browsers and where UNIX has been
replaced with a relatively massive software stack because not many people like
writing OS's but _everyone_ likes writing http servers and libraries. Don't
get me wrong, I'm still making a ton of skrill on Django and web programming
in general, but can we just raise the alarm a little bit? Web application
programming does not seem to have the goal of abstracting on top of web stacks
to make it into application programming, but rather stops at a C-like
worldview where it's still possible to utterly destroy all that is consistent
application state for the sake of being able to run trampolines written in
assembly.

~~~
lhc-
You do realize that django is MVC, but that templates are not the C right?
Their naming convention is kinda terrible, but the M is the models
(obviously), the V is the templates (the "views") and the C is the views.py
file (this is the poorly named part). If you compare to other MVC systems,
those are the appropriate parts of django.

~~~
knappador
Roles are mixed in Django almost without exception. I blame this on the fact
that you want to make changes to M, V, and C during a UI interaction while
usually only one URL gets called, and so the view updates the M, V, and C.
It's like having a layer cake to keep things separate and then cutting it from
the top into pie-slices. Sure it makes sense somewhat, but each slice now
contains every layer. That is typical web programming.

Unless you're using class-based views or Meteor etc AND hybrid-style API's,
things aren't even beginning to resemble application programming with a
separate network aspect to the application. These days I'd just about rather
print HTML/CSS onto paper so I can at least burn it. The whole web-standards
movement never grasped me as egalitarian or a good way to get FOSS into closed
platforms. I know there are supporters to web, but basically I view web as
pretty limited in spite of all the work that's been done with it.

Templates in Django are nothing that I would call views in application
programming. If I use data binding to hook up my controller state (in some way
a wrapper around the model), then this has nothing to do with the M, V, or T
in Django. It's a js object and not part of Django at all.

Templates _are_ a decent way to somewhat modularize HTML/CSS without falling
back to generating HTML/CSS from objects and giant data-structures, which
would be torture. This is not what views do.

------
bmoresbest55
So would you guys recommend getting this book or going a little bit more cheap
and getting the older version?

------
sahat
Is Django still relevant in the web community? I watched "Making Disqus
Realtime" a year ago, where they were talking about building a real-time
system using Django, gevent, gunicorn, Redis, Flask, nginx, haproxy. The
entire stack could be condensed into node.js + socket.io.

~~~
frankwiles
Still relevant? You've got to be kidding me. Sure node is the new cool thing,
but Django is going to "relevant" for years to come. Even just looking at job
openings in very tech forward places like SF the Django jobs out weigh node
jobs 5 to 1.

Keep in mind not everything needs to be that "real time" and it is also a
horrible business decision to rewrite your core apps in the latest framework
without reason.

~~~
spikels
Where do you get the 5:1 ratio?

Jobs in SF Bay Area on Craigslist: Node 95, Django 50

[http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/?sort=rel&areaID=1&subAre...](http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/?sort=rel&areaID=1&subAreaID=&query=node&catAbb=jjj)

[http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/?sort=rel&areaID=1&subAre...](http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/?sort=rel&areaID=1&subAreaID=&query=django&catAbb=jjj)

