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PART II
Web Development Sine Qua Nons
Real developers ship.
— Jeff Atwood
If this were just a guide to TDD in a normal programming field, we might be able to
congratulate ourselves about now. After all, we’ve got some solid basics of TDD and
Django under our belts; we’ve got all we need to start building a website.
But, real developers ship, and in order to ship, we’re going to have to tackle some of the
trickier but unavoidable aspects of web development: static files, form data validation,
the dreaded JavaScript, but most hairy of all, deployment to a production server.
At every stage, TDD can help us to get these things right too.
In this section, I’m still trying to keep the learning curve relatively soft, but we will meet
several major new concepts and technologies. I’ll only be able to dip lightly into each
one—I hope to demonstrate enough of each to get you started when you get to your
own project, but you will also need to do your own reading around when you start to
apply these topics in “real life”.
For example, if you weren’t familiar with Django before starting on the book, you may
find that taking a little time to run through the official Django tutorial at this point
would complement what you’ve learned so far nicely, and will leave you more confident
with the Django stuff over the next few chapters, so you can focus on the core concepts.
Oh, but there’s lots of fun stuff coming up! Just you wait!