Two Scoops of Django by Daniel Roy Greenfeld & Audrey Roy Greenfeld Summary

Two Scoops of Django by Daniel and Audrey Roy Greenfeld is a comprehensive guide to Django best practices, offering actionable advice for building maintainable projects. It uses a fictional ice cream company case study to illustrate concepts like project structure, ORM optimization, security, testing, and deployment. The 500-page book covers 35+ topics, including Django REST Framework, async tasks, and third-party package integration.

This book targets intermediate Django developers familiar with the framework’s basics but seeking to adopt industry-standard patterns. It’s ideal for engineers refining project architecture, teams enforcing coding standards, or developers preparing scalable applications for production.

Yes, the book is highly recommended for its practical, example-driven approach to Django best practices. Reviewers praise its coverage of real-world scenarios, anti-pattern avoidance, and updated editions aligning with Django versions. The blend of humor and structured guidance makes complex concepts accessible.

Daniel and Audrey Roy Greenfeld are Django experts with extensive industry experience, including roles at NASA and open-source contributions. Their combined technical expertise and teaching focus ensure the book’s balance of depth and readability.

The book emphasizes “fat models, thin views, stupid templates,” project structure standardization, and environment-specific settings management. It advocates for explicit over implicit code, secure deployment configurations, and systematic testing strategies. Anti-pattern examples like hardcoded paths or wildcard imports are highlighted as pitfalls to avoid.

It recommends modular app design, segregated settings files (e.g., base.py, production.py), and requirements.txt organization. The authors discourage placing virtual environments inside project folders and promote reusable utility modules over bloated views.

The book covers unit testing, integration testing, and tools like pytest-django. It stresses test isolation, mocking external APIs, and leveraging Django’s test client for web request simulation. Testing anti-patterns like overscoped test cases are critiqued.

Security practices include CSRF protection, XSS mitigation via template autoescaping, and proper cookie configuration. The book advises against storing secrets in version control and demonstrates HTTPS setup, password hashing, and permission management.

Deployment chapters detail server configuration (e.g., Gunicorn/Nginx), database optimization, and CI/CD pipelines. The authors emphasize monitoring, logging, and error-tracking tools like Sentry. Cloud platforms (AWS, Heroku) and containerization basics are also addressed.

It provides patterns for API versioning, serializer validation, and authentication (JWT/OAuth). The authors recommend throttling for rate limits, Swagger/OpenAPI documentation, and client-library integration tips. Common pitfalls like N+1 queries in serializers are discussed.

Some reviewers note the book’s density and occasional whitespace inefficiency. However, these are outweighed by its practicality, with most considering it indispensable post-official-tutorial material. The structured examples and humor are widely praised.

Each edition updates examples and recommendations for newer Django releases (e.g., 1.11 vs 3.x). The 3.x version expands async support, Django REST Framework enhancements, and modern tooling (Docker, GitHub Actions). Core principles remain consistent, making prior editions useful for legacy projects.