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During this last weekend I finally managed to reserve a couple of hours of “me time” to finish reading my complimentary copy of the book “Django 1.1 Testing and Debuggingâ€? from Packt Publishing!

Once again I felt completely absorbed by the style chosen for this Packt Publishing book, as it makes use of a complete application to reinforce all of the topics covered. You start with a brief explanation of the benefits of testing your code and immediately start building a market research application from scratch.

Every chapter is built on the previous one, covering topics such as doctests, unittests, and adding coverage information and reports via Ned Batchelder's coverage script. You also learn about using Django’s django.test.Client module and Twill to perform web testing and make sure that what your users see in their web browser is valid content and what they expected.

I liked the fact that several chapters were dedicated to showing you how to properly debug, log, and understand the information collected by these methods. Also how to fix any issues that may come up during the development phase, as well as write tests to catch them! I have definitely learned several new ways to look at debug information that I will make sure to add to my arsenal. Some of the tools you’ll learn include the awesome Django Debug Toolbar (I wrote about it here) and even the Python debugger (pdb), so if you’ve never heard of either one or need a refresher, you’ll enjoy the last chapters of this book.

By the time you’re done reading this book, you’ll have a complete market researching tool, including some Fancy Nancy charts generated by pygooglechart or matplotlib AND instructions on how to deploy it in a production environment and perform some load tests using siege!

Overall, this book offers good quality screenshots, clear and concise directions and working source code to follow along! I recommend it for anyone who’s doing Django development out there and would like to improve the quality of their applications by adding (more) tests!