The Definitive Guide to Pylons (Expert's Voice in Web Development) [Paperback]

James Gardner (Author)

Book Description

Series: Expert's Voice in Web Development | Publication Date: December 24, 2008

Spurred by the enormous popularity of Ruby on Rails, Web frameworks have revolutionized the way developers of all programming languages tackle the often complex task of web application development. Perhaps activity in this area is no greater than in the Python community, where three wildly popular frameworks have entered the fray, among them the Pylons project.

The Definitive Guide to Pylons is the first book to comprehensively introduce this popular framework, guiding readers through a wide-ranging array of features. Authored by Pylons project co-founder James Gardner, this book will sate user demand for long-desired project documentation.

See the following resources for more information on Pylons: Pylons Project website- http://pylonshq.com/

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

James Gardner is co-founder of the Pylons Web framework, and is a UK-based web developer, entrepreneur, and IT consultant. He's the founder of 3aims, Ltd., a web research and development company.

Product Details

• Paperback: 568 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (December 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590599349
• ISBN-13: 978-1590599341
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #279,517 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The book is OK, just a little inconsistent, December 30, 2009

By 

E. Kontsevoy - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Definitive Guide to Pylons (Expert's Voice in Web Development) (Paperback)

I found the book immensely helpful to kick-start a Pylons project I am working on. Every question I had in mind about how something worked was fully answered in the corresponding chapter. If you worked with Rails or Django and interested in Pylons, definitely get this book.

Its not all rosy, however. There are two things about this book that don't let me give it a 5 star rating.

First, there is an inconsistent assumption the author makes about reader's prior knowledge of web development and MVC frameworks. Some chapters would be harder for me to understand without my previous experience with Ruby on Rails, so I wonder if people without similar backgrounds could follow through. Yet some other chapters are obviously written for people without any web development experience: they are overly verbose and waste time needlessly explaining basics of web, http, caching and so on.

Second, the book isn't very smooth in its transitions from chapter to chapter, like if it was written by different people. I suspect this isn't authors fault but simply a reflection of what Pylons is. Since different parts of Pylons (views, form handling, ORM, routing, etc) come from different people they aren't always smoothly integrated and this fact gets reflected in the book as well. But hey, that's the whole point of using this framework!

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good in-depth book on Pylons (finally), January 30, 2009

By 

Cuong Do "tech dude" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Definitive Guide to Pylons (Expert's Voice in Web Development) (Paperback)

I've been intrigued by Pylons for a while, but I've found the online documentation inadequate for developing a deep and broad understanding of the framework. I like to thoroughly understand any substantial framework I use.

So, I was thrilled when I saw I first saw this book. On top of covering Pylons concepts (e.g. how those mysterious Pylons globals work) and real-world usage very thoroughly, it also covers other important web application programming topics, such as WSGI, Unicode, various data stores, and JavaScript. The tutorial chapters get a little lengthy, but a lot that goes into explaining how the sample code works.

This is not a quick-and-dirty "how to" book. This is a book that helps you thoroughly understand Pylons, so that you can mold it to your will.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A unique development tour, May 25, 2010

By 

xian (New Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Definitive Guide to Pylons (Expert's Voice in Web Development) (Paperback)

I'm a scientist and hobby programmer with long-time unix/linux and database (postgres) experience and a bit of python. I've always sort of dreaded webapp development, but been very curious at the same time. I knew i'd need to learn a good MVC framework eventually, but i was reluctant.

I discovered the online version of this book (which is free and open source; the website is a very nice way to search the book!), and have used it extensively in the last year to learn pylons and webapp development from the ground up, and i've really enjoyed the entire process.

I find this book unique in its "walk through all the details" approach. It's amazingly readable. Sure, some of the chapters are slower and more detail-filled than others, but I can sit and *read* it. It uses sentences that are arranged into paragraphs, into chapters. You know, the way books *used* to be? In any case, it's *not* a long, tedious list of facts designed to look like a book. I've relied upon online python and pylons docs to fill in some gaps, but overall, the book is thorough and spot-on.

I'm buying the physical book so that i can take it to my favorite coffeeshop and really read it. Screen reading is a great way to miss details. There are years of distilled experience in this book, up to and including how to structure a non-trivial development effort.