Customer Reviews

Professional Plone Development: Building robust, content-centric web applications with Plone 3, an open source Content Management System.

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is absolutely the book I had hoped it would be -- something to take me, an average Plone 2.5 administrator and developer, up to the next level of competency and into Plone 3.0. Our shop tends to be conservative and hangs back about 6 months before accepting a major new upgrade. This is the book that will keep me current and up-to-speed even though our production server is still back at 2.5.

Just a quick once-through has taught me a lot and suggests improvements for our existing Plone sites. The text provides a detailed case study and plenty of the examples. The sections on events, viewlets, and adapters have already been worth the price of the book.

Written primarily for a *NIX environment, it has enough Windows side notes for someone like me who operates Free BSD servers but develops on a Windows box. Definitely not for a Plone newbie, but not unapproachable for the intermediate level, this book will find a welcome place on developers' shelves. Aspeli has made a fine contribution and highlights the tremendously exciting Plone 3.0 features that are now available out of the box.

This well-written, lucid and very intelligent book is the perfect choice for those developers who must, for whatever reason, use plone. Far and away the best one out there. It is not comprehensive, by design, but rather concentrates on the 'best practice' elements of plone - zope 3 integration, elegant use of relational databases, well-structured deployments based on paste, integrating version control and so on.
Unfortunately, it is the elegance and clarity of this approach which really shines a light on the legacy inconsistencies, code-bloat, messiness and quirky multiples re-invention of the wheel that characterises Plone as it stands in 2008. By all means, if you are stuck with plone, use this book as a means of smoothing over your pain. But otherwise, it's perhaps most useful and some provocative ideas about how you could use Zope 3 to build new projects, as well as an elegant demonstration that despite plone moving towards coherence, there is a terrifying amount of nasty code out there in Plone that it takes a book this long and erudite to steer clear of. Maybe pick up Weitershausen's Web Component Development with Zope 3 for a similarly intelligent and eloquent, but far less terrifying, read.

Professional Plone Development, the right title for an excellent book.
Martin's book have the answers. Almost every aspect of Plone 3 pro-development is covered in this book,
- Creating instances with buildout
- Become familiar with the debugger
- Overriding Zope 3 components
- Using GenericSetup to create Extension Profiles
- Creating a Custom Theme
- Using the Archetypes Framework to create Custom Content Types
- Ajax in Plone, Rich User Interfaces with KSS
- Deployments in the real world

I'm still developing in Plone 2.5 but this book is always on my desk because a lot of stuff covered here could be used in 2.5 too.
[...]

This book is required reading if you want to start developing with Plone. It covers all the important concepts and true to its name does it the professional way by showing you how to model, build, test, deploy, optimize, etc. The example application developed step-by-step in the book is very good because it covers most of the things you'll need to know when starting out.

Although the book explains many plone/zope concepts well, there is no discussion of the Plone's architecture or API layout. Therefore, you'll spend a lot of time reading Plone's source code both while reading the book and after finishing it. Another drawback is that the level of detail is sparse and you'll need to refer to online sources quite frequently.

As for the price, $40 is a bit high and the cheap production quality doesn't help it much. They should have used a better designer.

Some would say this book deserves 5 stars because there isn't another book that is so authoritative. However, Plone's documentation is sub-par compared to the Plone itself so I won't give them extra credit for something that's long overdue.

All in all, a pretty good book. They have a PDF version that is $10 cheaper and I would recommend buying that instead.

The book covers Plone 3 development in depth and is also very current, as it was released almost together with the Plone 3.0 release. When using open source technologies, it's rare to have a book that covers a technology so thoroughly and in so timely a fashion as Martin's book does with Plone 3. Also, he is a core Plone developer, which gives the book a lot of authority.

The structure of the book is well thought out and the division in four parts clearly delineates the path taken by the author. The length of each part really reflects its importance with respect to the main subject of the book, which is the development of content centric web applications.

A case study is developed throughout the book, with full code available for download at the publisher's special book site. Many readers of this book will be looking to use Plone 3 for a project of their own soon, and following the discussion by the author about how to best apply Plone's many capabilities to the case study may help put things in perspective for them.

One other important thing about the book is that it focuses a lot on proposing a set of best practices for modern Plone development, like developing on the file system with source control, testing heavily, using buildouts to create repeatable development environments and turning to Zope 3 component based development. Rather than spending a separate chapter or two on this, the practices are generally integrated into every chapter by way of example.

I sincerely recommend that any web developer seriously interested in Plone buy Professional Plone Development by Martin Aspeli today. Martin's book is a timely and authoritative guide to Plone 3 development and a statement of best practices at the same time.

Martin's book is great. It is no reference book, and it is not a book intended for beginners. It is intended for developers. If you are serious about developing Plone applications, you have to read this book.

It covers all of the aspects involved in Plone development; such as setting-up a development environment, automating unit and integration tests, customizing themes, building custom content types, integrating Plone with relational databases, improving user experience and improving performance and scalability.

As I said, if you are serious about developing Plone applications you have to read this book.

I started with Plone about a year ago, doing visual design through the web-interface it provides. Martin's book opened my eyes to a whole new way of developing for this platform. It's certainly an advanced users book (I'm still working my way through it), but should be considered required reading for anyone who considers themselves a Plone developer.

NOTE: If you are a Windows developer, get ready to do a lot of Googling to figure out certain commands on your machine. I wound up installing a Ubuntu distribution because everything is so much harder to do in Windows.

This is a great book for python developers who are looking to dive into Zope and Plone. The book walks you through the process of creating a web site for a fictional client using Plone. Martin Aspelli provides not only technical information about Plone, but also lays out a lot best practices for Plone development which is the real value of this book. And so, the book begins with planning the project and takes you through all of the steps of development.

This book is not likely to turn a total neophyte into a full fledged developer. Topics outside of the scope of the book get mentioned, but little attention is paid to them. For example, Aspelli spends a page on source control and basically says: You should use it. Of course, it's this same quality that makes this book great for seasoned developers who know little about Plone or know about Plone 2.5 and want to learn more about Plone 3.0.

A couple of the topics in the book are really cutting edge and need a "try at your own risk" label. Here, I'm particularly thinking about varnish which I've never gotten to work even when setting it up the way the book describes.

All in all though, this is a great book. Someone said that it is the best Plone book out there and I would agree with that. The true companion to this book is the Plone community. (Aspelli mentions this on page 15.) The book is a great way to get your foot in the door, the community will really help you become a Plone expert.

I received a review copy of this book, and immediately found it to be useful. One of the interesting aspects of the book is the coverage of SQLAlchemy, LDAP, and Varnish. It is obvious that the author is using cutting edge libraries and techniques, and it was great to hear the advice of an expert. If you do work with Plone from configuration to development, it would be an essential book to own.

I am moving away from OpenACS/Aolserver and decided to look more into Plone/Zope so that I can use Python for development. I purchased this book last week and I am about half way through the book. This book is great. It walks you through a Plone 3 installation step-by-step. Plone 3 is awesome and I highly recommend this book to anyone who is serious about web development with Plone. The book covers all of the latest Plone 3 topics - including Relational db connectivity to Plone, current testing methodologies and their applicability to Plone, in-depth detail on Plone 3 security, and much more!!
Bryan Hinton