Resurrecting the Original Django Book
The original Django Book, first published online in 2006 at DjangoBook.com, is now available again at that same domain.
Brief History of the Original Django Book
Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss published two editions of the book, the first came out in 2007, as Adrian notes here, and the second edition in 2009. There were plans to continue updating it, and Jacob posted the source code with the idea of open-sourcing updates. That never fully came to fruition.
As a book author myself of several Django books that I’ve seen updated multiple times, I get it. Updating, let alone writing a book, is a tremendous amount of time. You truly have no idea until you’ve done it. Even once the manuscript is complete, there’s a whole other process involved in getting a physical or e-book out there: cover design, interior design, copyediting, code checking, etc. It takes forever.
DjangoBook.com History
The last official version of this Django Book covered Django 1.0 and, as a result, is extremely out of date. That said, it’s interesting how much architecturally remains the same even now, over 15 years later. I read the original Django book back in 2012, when I started my Django journey, and I still think it is worth reading today.
So what happened to the DjangoBook.com domain? Adrian and Jacob eventually donated it to Nigel George, the author of five books and online courses, most notably Mastering Django. He spent a good number of years writing and updating these books before also deciding to stop and focus elsewhere. Nigel contacted me in 2022 to ask if I might be interested in the domain, given that I am still active in creating and updating Django content.
I said yes, with the idea that the site would remain a community resource. So, along with Jeff Triplett, DjangoBook.com became a single-page resource of all currently in-print Django books. And it has remained that ever since, receiving some traffic but not too much.
Agents Give You Wings
I had long meant to include the original Django book online, but just never found the time and energy to do so. Until the thought occurred to me, last night at 10 pm, what if I used Claude Code?
Fifteen minutes later, the current site, complete with links to the original book, was live. I didn’t need an agent to do this, but when you’re feeling lazy but have just enough motivation to do something, they are amazing.
So what was the process? The current website consisted of a single index.html file and an images/ folder for book covers, all hosted for free on Netlify. Easy-peasy. The Django Book is available on GitHub, so I just had to do some prompting.
I told Claude Code to create a new directory called book with the contents of that repo, then add a link from the current index.html page to it. A few small tweaks later, the current version is now available with a link to the original Django book in all its glory.
