Written by Adrian Holovaty on January 9, 2009

I'm excited to announce that I'm working on a second edition of the Django Book.

The first edition, which I cowrote with Jacob Kaplan-Moss, was published in print by Apress more than a year ago, and, sadly, it's become out of date. It covers Django version 0.96, and many of the examples don't work with the current version, 1.0.

Fortunately, now that Django has reached 1.0 and is committed to backwards compatibility, this book will have a much longer shelf life. :-)

At this point, I've rewritten/edited the first three chapters and published the drafts for free online, as we did the first time around. I plan to add chapters incrementally over the coming weeks. Instead of posting blog entries here, I'll make those "new chapter posted" announcements on my Twitter account.

What's new in this edition? I'm not only updating examples to work with 1.0; I'm also doing a full rethinking and rewriting of many of the sections and will probably add a couple of chapters (testing Django apps, anyone?).

As before, we've got a slick granular comment system so that you can leave feedback on particular paragraphs. These were invaluable for the first edition, so I hope folks submit lots of great comments (without, I hope, finding too many errors!).

Apress has signed on again to publish the second edition in print. Also as before, I'm happy to report that the book will remain free online. The first edition is still available in its entirety, too, but I've added some much-needed caveats that it's out of date.

Jacob is sitting this one out due to time constraints, so I'll be doing the writing/rewriting, and the fine editors at Apress will be editing. It's easier to rewrite than write from scratch, so it shouldn't take too long.

Dig in, enjoy, and leave plenty of comments!