Zope 3 Developer's Handbook (Developer's Library)

Zope 3 Developer's Handbook (Developer's Library)
by Stephan Richter

Zope 3 Developer's Handbook (Developer's Library)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Stephan Richter
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-01-30
ISBN: 0672326175
Number of pages: 456
Publisher: Sams

Book Reviews of Zope 3 Developer's Handbook (Developer's Library)

Book Review: Useful, but limited in scope and effectiveness
Summary: 3 Stars

I bought this book hoping it would be a good introduction to Zope 3. I browsed it in the bookstore and it seemed to include all necessary ingredients introduced in a sensible sequence.

The book is targeted at reasonably experienced developers, who know well the basic concepts of content publishing, and who've written Python code far beyond the "hello, world!" stage.

My main gripe with it, is that it assumes too much that the reader is familiar with the Zope 2 platform. As such, many terms were left unexplained, while others were presented only by comparison with their Zope 2 counterparts.

Subsequently, although this isn't exactly the fault of the author, the book was primarily written using a development version of Zope 3. In all fairness, the book was published shortly after the first final release of Zope 3, so it would have been impossible to meet the deadline of the publisher and have written it all using the final release. So, some things work, others don't without some tweaking.

The general structure of the book is sound. Some things could have been introduced at different places in the development stage. For instance, internationalisation is described extensively before the reader is presented anything about component development, which seems backwards to me. In general, however, the progression is fairly natural.

A typical chapter presents the scenario of the lesson, followed by an example, followed by the functional tests. The main problem is that there is little analysis, if any, about the principles of the system just introduced. Generalising from the examples in the book is very difficult for two reasons: they include the idiosyncrasies of the author, and other sources of documentation of Zope itself are too scarce and miserable to allow one to achieve a deeper understanding of the point of view of the author.

To put it shortly, the book presents the personal views of the author on Zope 3 development, with very few explanations of the logic behind them. Perhaps these reasons are obvious for a reader experienced with Zope 2. However, given the radical design differences between Zope 2 and Zope 3 (claimed on their site), I fail to see why I should first learn Zope 2, in order to easily understand this book.

The focus on functional tests is admirable, and many developers will, hopefully, learn from it. However, I believe it is misplaced in a book that suffers from the lack of explanations of the reasoning behind the author's opinion.

Ultimately, it is just some structured information about a product that doesn't have virtually any documentation aside of IRC logs and some functional tests, which are considered to be documentation by its developers. No matter how self-documenting their code might be (and it is!), the structure of such a complex system cannot be learnt only from reading the source code.

I asked myself if I would buy this book after, say, having borrowed it for a while from a library. I tend to say no.

If you needed to learn Zope 3 immediately, then buy it. It's probably the best book available on this topic at the time I'm writing this review. However, it is nowhere near good.

Summary of Zope 3 Developer's Handbook (Developer's Library)

Be the first in line when the green flag for Zope 3 goes down with the help of the Zope Developer's Handbook. This collection of cookbook recipes provides easy-to-follow solutions to common problems you may face as a Zope or Python developer when beginning to implement the Zope 3 open-source application server. Utilize the book's solutions-oriented, task-based structure, as well as the supporting website for code used in each recipe, to help build your Zope components. Stay at the front of the line with the Zope Developer's Handbook.

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