Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging

I borrowed a copy of Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging from a friend today. Spent the bus ride home from the office flipping through the pages, and I’ve got to say – it’s a pretty darned good book!

If you’re new or newish to Django development, it’s a book that I think would be good to have in your stable. Even with Django 1.2 now released, everything in the book is super relevant, and Karen Tracey has done a really wonderful job of explaining and then showing with details the soup to nuts run of how to do and deal with testing a django application … and more importantly how to debug when things go awry.

The book covers unit tests, doctests, testing through the WSGI interface with the Django unit test extensions, and even driving a website test set with twill. It’s thorough and chock full of examples and walk through goodness.

The debugging is even more detailed – going to a lot of trouble to explain tracebacks, the format of the Django error pages, how to get convenient debug data on your django project (using Django Debug Toolbar), and finally – how to even use the python debugger to step through execution. She goes to a lot of trouble to set up real-world scenarios that are slightly and subtly broken and then walk through the whole process of solving the issue with the tools at hand.

I’ll be keeping John’s copy for another day or two, and then getting my own copy to stack into the reference shelf.