Here is, yet another, 5-star review.

Summary:

* Better beginner resource than official docs and other books

* Up-to-date (mine was printed on the same day that I ordered the book)

* Quick read (went through it in just a few days)

The Full Review:

When I first started to play around w/ python I remember setting up an API by following DRF's quickstart. It worked. I set an API up but I couldn't do anything w/ it. I didn't understand what was going on or what had happened behind the scenes to get this app up and running. Going through the rest of the official documentation, I realized that it's meant for people who are comfortable w/ Python and are VERY comfortable w/ Django. But if you haven't had a chance to build several production projects where you've installed and successfully configured 3rd party apps, the official tutorial can be hard to follow.

I've since had the opp to play around w/ Django a bit. I've built a few real-life apps w/ it. About a month ago I reached a pt where I needed to implement an API for one such project. I revisited the official tutorial but while I understood a lot more this time, I still felt somewhat lost.

I decided to follow an e-book that I got a few months back as part of an e-book bundle purchase I made. Everything was going great until chapter 2 when the code presented didn't work. I found that the number one complain for that book was errors in code. No good.

Searching for a DRF-specific book, I this book. I have Vincent's "Django for Beginners" book and I've found it to be the best resource for DJango by far. Knowing that I liked his way of teaching and his way of writing, I went for this book instantly. Didn't even bother to read the reviews.

The first thing to note about this book is that it is up-to-date. How new and fresh is the information in the book? The bottom part of the very last page has the print date. Mine was printed the very same day I purchased it. EVERY piece of software referenced matched the actual latest version of said software/add-on. This alone, is reason enough to purchase this book over any other.

William takes time to explain how REST works. He provides details for how requests and tokens and codes are sent back and forth from client to server. Every piece of code works and the explanation of said code is very easy to understand.

This is a quick read. Should be doable in a weekend if you've got nothing else going on. You'll be up and running a real API in no time. Better yet, you will be at a point where you can jump over to the official DRF docs. My next steps will definitely be to get a better handle on the 3rd party software used in the book (swagger, rest_auth, allauth, etc). Again, this book sets you up so that you can use all of these packages' official docs as reference... as they were intended to be used.

Buy this book if you are new to APIs, have been developing Django apps for less than a yr, or if you've set up DRF-based APIs using the official docs but still not quite sure how/why things work.

The best first book on APIs I've read for Django. If you've worked through the first book, then this one gets even better.

I follow most of William S. Vincent's post. He helps me make sense of a lot of Django and produce better code. I jumped at his REST API book. I think it is a very clear guide for someone first starting in DRF. He goes through all the fundaments of Django Rest Framework (DRF) and even some of the better parts of DRF: viewsets, routers, and the overwhelming authentication/authorization. WIll get you feeling comfortable with this bad boy, no doubt.

A good overview of DRF, going from setting up basic endpoints, serializers, generic views to eventually viewsets and routers. Key concepts.

It's less in-depth and thorough than the flagship Django for Beginners. It's about 60% as big, but then DRF is smaller than Django. Still, I felt like DfB got me further along in Django than this did in DRF.

My version was printed in May 2023 and is sadly not updated as much as my Django for Beginners published on the same date. It still users Heroku (no longer free) for deployment and has outdated commands for installing pscyopg2.

The biggest slow down is chapter 8 on authentication. Token auth does not work as described, and there are Stack Overflow posts about it. I was also unclear why we needed both dj-rest-auth and django-allauth. These are small nits that keep it from getting a full five stars

Learned a ton working through this book, absolute must buy for anyone looking to continue learning and growing in their django development

I bought both of the author's books, this one and Django for beginners. They are both very elementary. If you are clueless and want to get into programming with Django, these will be perfect for you. They are treating the material at the middle school level, which is good for real beginners. If you want more though, you should really look around. I have also bought "Practical Django 2 and Channels 2: Building Projects and Applications with Real-Time Capabilities"

by Federico Marani on Amazon. It is a much more serious treatment of the subject, it addresses several critical details that you would need for any beyond-toy web apps. Also you eventually end up with a serious serious application. The most unfair part of Vincent's book and the other is, they are really very expensive for what they are offering. Practical Django 2 is doing everything and more for only $30, including API development, websockets(!) etc, while Vincent charges 2x$39=$78 for two really toy books. If you are into API, that already means you'll need more and this book is probably not for you. But again, if you are a clueless beginner, that might be your book.

This book was a revelation for me. After struggling to follow along with the official REST Framework tutorial, I was ready to try something else. This book changed that. It's truly amazing--as the author notes--how little code it takes to build production-ready web APIs. Even things like documentation and authorization are handled with ease. I'm sold.

Thanks so much to the author. Great job. I am an ASP.Net Web API developer and I was struggling with Django Rest Framework documentation, because it assumes that you dominate Django. I was kind of lost. I tried several tutorials and I was working okay with them, but I wasn't learning the things I wanted to learn, as registration, tokens, and more.

It worths the money 100%. The books also has helped me to realize that there are a lot of things that I could be doing better even with the ASP.Net Web API. I can't wait to move completely from ASP.Net Web APi to Django Rest.

My only minor, but really minor complain it's the Kindle version has to improve the code layout, because there are some coding lines that get unorganized. But other than that 5/5!!!!

I appreciated it a lot.

I'm satisfied

Excellent book about implementation of API using Django - material is well presented, it is easy to follow and everything is very well explained. This is probably the best book for somoone who wants to advance his Django knowledge and build APIs. There is no need to look for anything alse. There is another book in the series - Django for Profesionals - highly recommended. Those books are going to save you a lot of time learning Django.

The author explained all concepts very well. Personally, I was expecting custom user model creation and adding endpoints to it. But this books covers django allauth.

洋書だが、簡単な英語で書かれているので、日本人でもサクサク読める。（英語の勉強にもなる）

全ての手順がチュートリアルとして記載されており、簡単なアプリケーション作成を通して、DjangoのAPIの作成方法を学ぶことができる。

中には、フロントエンドをReact、バックエンドをDjangoで作成する簡単なアプリ作成もあり、学べる点が多いと感じた。