Customer Reviews

CherryPy Essentials: Rapid Python Web Application Development: Design, develop, test, and deploy your Python web applications easily

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This book was slightly disappointing. I really like cherrypy, and was hoping for a really good, in-depth look at its internals. There are a few chapters in this book that are very good, but the vast majority of it is spent looking at how to integrate things like ORM layers and templating languages into your cherrypy app.

If I was new to the web-development scene, I would have gotten a lot from this book, but since I'm not, I didn't learn much from the majority of the book.

So, if you're new to making web-apps, and want to use cherrypy - this would be a good book to read. Otherwise, you're probably better off reading the cherrypy source / wiki.

CherryPy Essentials guides you through learning CherryPy from beginning to end. The first three chapters of the book offer the basics of working with CherryPy (from inception, to install, to basic usage). A nice plus, which I think more books should do, occurs at the beginning of Chapter 3 where a functional web application is presented. Although short and to the point, the application does give a since of what is possible with CherryPy in a "Rapid" development perspective.

Another good point about the book is that it does give a wide overview of what is "possible" with CherryPy from Templating, to Web Services, and even Testing.

The book is well organized and can serve as a an excellent resource for anyone looking to give CherryPy a look for their web development projects.

PROS

* Well laid out and easy to follow
* Explains an assortment of useful tools for CherryPy
* Helps to get started quickly with the framework
* Includes excellent online resource

CONS

* Would like to have seen either a Web 2.0 application to be built or an enterprise level application built (even though a Photo album was presented for much of the second half of the book)
* Doesnt focus on a lot of the internals of CherryPy

OVERALL

Overall, this is one of the best books I have ever read. Very easy to get through. If you are new to CherryPy or web application development, this book is an excellent choice.

This is not a CherryPy reference manual; It is a broad introduction to a myriad of topics, intended for new web developers.

There are only two chapters (chapter 3 & 4, a total of 50 pages) that really discuss the CherryPy core itself. All other chapters cover topics that somehow relate to CherryPy (for example: template engines, SSL, REST, ORM, integrating CherryPy and Apache).

If there is one thing that this book is good for, it is for giving you a broad view of how CherryPy can be used. Even though I have been using CherryPy for a few years, there were many things I never knew CherryPy came included with (Template support, for example). Because I did not know this, I had re-invented many of those features myself for my websites -- I wish I had known that they were already there! This book does a good job of giving you the "big picture" view so that you do not unnecessarily re-invent any more wheels than you need to.

I found this book very helpful while I was learning CherryPy. The online documentation is missing some content that is available in the book. The book is not an exhaustive CherryPy reference manual. Instead, it provides an excellent example of how to use CherryPy to build a web application. The online docs tell what the various components of CherryPy do, but this book explains how to use those components to do something useful. If you're new to CherryPy, and find the online docs a bit sparse, this book is well worth the investment.

I use CherryPy and had been on the fence about this book. A book about CherryPy would be a great resource for me, and I want to support the CherryPy folks.

There's a sample chapter on the web. Based on that chapter, I will not order the book--The book needed to have a better editor. The text is verbose; they could have cut 50-60% of the words and not lost any meaning. Also, based on the Table of Contents, the book spends at least 50% of its content on things that are not directly CheeryPy, just related to CherryPy.

The sample chapter does not reflect a book that is highly technical and geared towards highly technical people; if you're pretty savvy with the concept of Web frameworks, this book isn't going to add much to your library.

I'm sorry to say that most people should stick with the online docs for now.

I could not really decide if the book was good for what it was supposed to be because there are no indentations in the Python code. It is all lined up against the edges so you have to guess which class defs are in and other such things.