Somehow this part of the discussion never made it here. Here is the
copy of it
Thanks for all the replies whether you agreed or disagreed. My post
really meant to point out some of the frustrations a newbie might go
through while coming up to speed with Django. I am aware Django is a
volunteer project and I would be more than happy to help out with its
development. However I don't think I have enough experience with
Django to be able to contribute, at least not yet.
I am actually not a huge believer in documentation. Documents get out
dated very quickly. As I mentioned in my previous post, a sample
working site that demonstrates the most commonly used Django
functionality (functionality current release offers) should be packed
as part of the package.
Many developers who decide to pick up Django as their web framework
won't be beginners. Probably most of them already have professional
experience with other web technologies. These professionals would like
to see working code examples rather than pages long tutorials. Working
code is the BEST documentation one can ever find.
If I could help to pack up a sample site with the Django release I
WOULD. But I believe there are more experienced individuals who can
accomplish this task much better than I do at this time.
Regards,
Arif Yayalar
I don't know if you've noticed, but code examples go out of date too.
Any Django code example from a year ago will be just as dated as a
document.
You have stumbled across Django in an unfortunate time for
documentation. We've just gone through a big push to get to Version
1.0; in the months leading up to that release, a lot of backwards
incompatible changes that we had been putting off were made in rapid
succession in order to give us a stable platform for development.
Unfortunately, this broke a lot of documentation and code. However,
now that v1.0 is here, we intend to be very sensitive about backwards
compatibility.
>As I mentioned in my previous post, a sample working site that
> demonstrates the most commonly used Django functionality (functionality
> current release offers) should be packed as part of the package.
This resource already exists - The tutorial walks you through the
process of building a really simple site; we'd love to extend this
tutorial to encompass other common features. djangosites.org gives a
large number of more complex Django sites, and many of them provide
source code you can inspect.
> Many developers who decide to pick up Django as their web framework won't be
> beginners. Probably most of them already have professional experience with
> other web technologies. These professionals would like to see working code
> examples rather than pages long tutorials.
I guess we will just have to disagree here. I'm a professional with a
PhD, and I was originally attracted to Django specifically because of
the quality of its documentation, having given up trying to
comprehensively wrap my head around Zope, PHP, and Rails - three
projects with appalling documentation, but more examples and snippets
than you can poke a stick at. IMHO Examples are great, but they are
only a small part of a comprehensive documentation for a project.
One reason for this is that an example can't exercise every feature of
an API. I challenge you to write an example that demonstrates every
feature of the Django query language. In order to keep an example
clear, you need to leave some features out. However, a well structured
document document can describe every feature of an API.
I would also challenge your assertion that "most" of our users have
experience with other web platforms. Hang around the django-users
mailing list for a while - you may be surprised to find out how many
people are using Django as their first entry into *programming*, let
along web programming.
> Working code is the BEST
> documentation one can ever find.
The caveat here is *working*. There are just as many broken code
examples on the web as there are broken documents.
Yours,
Russ Magee %-)
On Nov 12, 8:38 pm, Nick Lo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Well... I disagree. Django IS tough, especially if you're from a PHP/
> > SQL school of thought. Don't get me wrong, I think it's worth toughing
> > it out. How many times however have I been stuck on simple things,
> > seeing the SQL I want but just not able to Django-ize it.
>
> I've been there too but this issue isn't really specific to Django,
> it's really an ORM issue. You'd have the same learning curve going
> from a "PHP/SQL school of thought" to using a PHP framework like Zend
> Framework for example.
>
>
>
> > To answer Russ' question, I for one would like to see documentation
> > that gives concrete examples on how to convert from PHP/SQL to Python/
> > Django. For example:
>
> > In PHP, you'd write:
> > $result = mysql_query("
> > SELECT Category.id, CategoryName.name, SubCategory.id,
> > SubCategoryName.name
> > FROM Category
> > INNER JOIN CategoryName ON CategoryName.Category_id = Category.id
> > INNER JOIN SubCategory ON SubCategory.Category_id = Category.id
> > INNER JOIN SubCategoryName ON SubCategoryName.SubCategory_id =
> > SubCategory.id
> > WHERE Category.active = 1
> > AND SubCategory.active = 1
> > AND CategoryName.languagecode = 'en'
> > AND SubCategoryName.languagecode = 'en'
> > ORDER BY CategoryName.name, SubCategoryName.name");
>
> > In Django, the same query is performed like this:
> > (I wish I knew...)
>
> You can do it pretty well the same way:
>
> http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/sql/
>
> You don't have to use the Django ORM for everything and you can always
> fall back on just SQL until you're confident enough.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Nick
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