Zopetm Bible [With CDROM]

The Zope Bible took me where I needed to go in learning Zope. While the Zope Book was quite excellent on the use of Zope and the Zope Management Interface (ZMI) for doing work, it was far, far too thin on the scripting and programming front.The Book of Zope had very little I found useful.I bought the Zope Bible after looking it over in them bookstore for about a half-hour. It is not for Zope newbies, for sure (though a particularly hardy newbie could probably grok it OK). But if you've done some Zope work and you find yourself hemmed in by the fences of the ZMI and hampered by a lack of ability to understand how the Zope objects interact with one another and with the outside world, this book is exactly right. It has answered more than a dozen questions I had that I had asked on the Zope mailing list to no avail.The book is clear, well-written, cleanly organized and quite complete.I agree it's probably not worthy of the monikder "Bible" but it is easily the most comprehensive book on Python devleopment in and for Zope that you'll find. And, believe me, you need to learn Python to make most effective use of Zope for anything beyond toy apps. Zope's ZClasses are a fragile gossamer. The real power is in the Python programmability of the thing.

I have a fair amount of experience in Python, but I had not yet had time to really get into Zope despite being intrigued by it for some time. When the opportunity presented itself to do some work with Zope, I jumped at the chance... only to find myself somewhat lost in a thicket of new concepts and vocabulary.After initially trying with "The Zope Book" and "Zope Web Application Development and Content Management," I could create simple applications with dtml and pythonscripts, but I still felt like I wasn't really grokking Zope: I felt that the things which I created were not terribly scalable or portable. There is an extensive section on ZPatterns in the end of "Web Application Dev," but I gave that a pass when I found that ZPatterns are not supported in the current Zope releases.This book was exactly what I needed to get past that wall: The section on application development in Python allowed me to leverage my existing knowledge to create some products that have now gone into full production use. I now feel much more confident building, extending, and integrating Zope apps. This book is well written; It answered the questions that I came up with almost as soon as I came up with them, making it an easy read. The code listings were helpful without being prohibitively long. The book doesn't coddle the reader with excessive detail on simple topics, but gives just enough to understand. I loaned this book to a friend who only knows Perl and C, and he found the included Python intro enough to bring him up to speed on Python as well as Zope.All that said, there is no substitute for actually sitting down with Zope and playing with it. This book will not make you an expert on the complete system, but it will make Zope transparent enough that you can continue your education on your own.

If you want to do Python Products in Zope, you need this book.The nice thing about Zope is that it's written in Python, but it's hard to find your way through the thicket of web modules to the elegant programmming language underneath.Zope Bible contains the best step-by-step howto I have found for putting your application logic into Python classes (where it belongs) and then wrapping it up in the Zope persistence and display machinery.The rest of the book consists of good clear explanations of the essential Zope components, including an excellent discussion of connecting to SQL databases.

I think this book is quite strong in the sense thatit provides detailed information on Product developments andinside workings of Zope which is not available in other titles.I've god all the books on Zope and find that this is the bestone for developers. Besides this book, programmers should alsolook at the Zope: Web Application Development book by New Riderswhich is also a good book!

The truncated version of my full review (space prohibits the whole thing, full version lives [on the web]):What's Bad?Zope Bible is a misnomer. There is a lot of great information here, but many sections are to shallow to be of any use. A more appropriate title would be Python for Zope or Advanced Zope Development with Python or some such. It claims to be beginner to advanced, but it is not organized in a manner that will be useful to Zope newbies and the things a beginner needs to know most often are missing or covered in such little detail as to be as good as missing. They could have dropped the first 3 chapters and used that space to flesh out some of the later chapters and perhaps do a second case study.What's Good?The sections that are good are very good. It's well written, they obviously have a deep understanding of Zope, and I didn't catch any technical errors. The writing is clear and effective. If you're already familiar with Zope and already have The Zope Book and The Book of Zope, then this would be a great next book for getting more into the Python parts of Zope. I particularly liked that they built an actual useful product from end to end in the course of several chapters explaining how different features of Zope can be used. The reference sections on CM and DBM are great. It's nice to see some aspects of Zope that are woefully underdocumented get addressed (Templates, DB integration, Security, Searching) even if some of them aren't in as much detail as I'd like.