Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

Though full of information and good reference material, to read this book sequentially is confusing and overly verbose.

I'd like to see this author write a reference volume, rather than a tutorial-natured book like this attempts to be.

The Definitive Guide to Pylons is clearly a comprehensive book on a
complex subject. I struggled with Pylons development a lot when
starting out (and still do in some regards) and this book helped me
understand the architecture, the reasons why things were designed and
implemented the way they are, and the general philosophy of the
framework. The book has very comprehensive sections on setting up a
basic site, using views and the model, and doing more interesting
things with routing. There are also good sections on testing,
internationalization and localization, and AJAX.

The main area I felt this book was lacking in was the deployment
section. I began reading this book and I was very confused about how
to actually get my pylon's application running in a production
webserver such as Apache, and I finished reading and was only slightly
less confused, and still without any strong amount of success.

Overall, I think someone with a bit more Python experience than I have
can benefit greatly from this book while learning Pylons. In most
areas it is very clear and comprehensive on the subject being
addressed.

This book has tremendous breadth and serves as great reference material. It is also quite good for getting you up and running quickly with a basic project skeleton and introducing you quickly to key Pylons concepts.

Where it fails is in its inconsistency and laborious "tutorial". The amount to which the authors go into details varies per concept. For some, they assume you know nothing about the web and go to great effort to communicate even the simplest of ideas. For others, they assume you have worked with a modern web framework before and you are simply moving over to Pylons. I personally do not mind the verbosity, but I think consistency would have made the book a smoother read.

I found the application you build in the tutorial to be confusing and flawed in its design (due to some of the choices made by the authors, not because of Pylons). In particular, chapter 14 felt extremely unpolished and misguided. With having to copy/paste large sections of code, search/replace to substitute variable names in said copied code, read through sections and sections of source code without understanding where the author was going, I found it hard not to get lost in the details.

That being said, there is a lot of valuable material in the book and I would still recommend it to those starting out or moving from a different framework. Just expect the urge to skip over quite a bit of material.

I love the Pylons framework and really find this book to be a great walk through. It's not necessarily the best book for picking up, hitting the index, and finding exactly what you need (though I don't think it's terrible at that either), but it _does_ present a great way to learn a web development framework.

It's unlikely you'd just jump into something like a web framework and start looking for particular topics - you're going to need an overview. This book is extremely readable and takes you piece by piece through this exceptional framework. Pylons, in particular, is a more open ended framework that gives you tighter control without forcing things down your throat, and as such, is a little more complex to start out with. In the end, though, I think you'll find it very rewarding to read through this book and become proficient with the framework. Highly recommended!

Overly verbose, confusing. Lacks a lot of the little (important) details. Found myself very frustrated, the examples not working. Had better luck using the Tutorials on the PylonsHQ website. Emailed author, he's non-responsive. Don't waste your money. I'm a PHP/Coldfusion programmer; been programming 28 years and speak over 10 computer languages. I've never commented on a book before, but this one just pissed me off.