We are still investigating the options, but OpenAuth seems like a pretty useful open and applicable standard for authenticating users. In the book, we are trying to build up a series of guides on useful tools and toolkits for doing things.
So I'd also like to read about the pros and cons of the various authentication packages.
Yeah there are a million ways to deploy for simplicity we choose PythonAnywhere. This was mainly because when you are teaching 200+ students, you need it to be easy, quick, and free (also it doesn't require a credit card to join).
We also hope to expand this chapter in the future to show how to migrate to a real database.
If you have some suggestions about other platforms to deploy on we'd love to hear them.
We'll be releasing a pdf and ebook in the future, but if you can't wait you can download the source for the book from github, see http://bit.ly/1bVKKJf
We've written the book in Python Sphinx so it is easy to compile into pdf.
By "beginner" we mean, someone with knowledge of Python, and who has started to play around with Django (i.e. started to undertake the official django tutorials).
We started the book to help my 3rd year undergraduate computer science students, who learn python in 1st year.
So I'd also like to read about the pros and cons of the various authentication packages.