Customer Reviews

The Zope Book

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

 

 

I think a lot of the reviewers for this book are blinded by the fact that Zope is an incredibly cool and powerful technology, especially for the price.

By all means wax lyrical about the capabilities of the platform. Be thankful that it is finally becoming accepted, documented, and widely deployed. But please don't think that this book is great, just because it talks about Zope and is written by a couple of very well-respected zopistas.

I was quite disappointed by this work. It fails to deliver on the promise of teaching you how to build useful applications in Zope. It's 350 pages of "what Zope is" and about 34 pages of "how to use it to do something useful".

This is a common problem with most Zope documentation - the authors themselves get carried away with the technology and fail to point out how it might be usefully implemented. Yet sadly, the Zope community really, really needs a task-focused book like that.

As an introduction to what Zope is, though, this book's not too bad - even if it is a rewrite of online documentation. Hence three stars.

Within the last years, the web has become a somewhat serious business. Complex websites no longer use static, hard to update html pages, information is less and less stored in a plain filesystem like we are used to with our personal files.

Sharing ideas with hundred, millions of people (I mean creating a web presence!) involves at least 3 backend elements :

- a database,
- a server,
- a "gluing" language

Zope provides the three in the same application, perfectly integrated and quite easily deployed (respectively Zodb, Zserver, and Python)

What was needed for zope recognition as a good candidate for "out of the box", opensourced, and efficient development plateform, was a good book that would introduce the whole tool for newbies as well as experienced web developers. In short, anyone looking for something more innovative than the traditional solutions (php/apache/mysql on the opensource side / asp/IIS, sqlserver on the commercial side ...)

The book realy helps to "take a grip" at Zope. You'll quickly learn the benefits of a totally object oriented approach (look at the poor object oriented approach of other web scripting tools, such as php, asp or coldfusion), and more importantly, *how* to use the tool.

Chances are that this book won't suffice for realy complex implementations (like creating custom products), but imho Zope is more a "concept" than any other tools, and *understanding* the concept is the key to successfull implementations.

Beside the differents chapters (with each speaking about a particular domain of Zope), you'll find a complete reference of the Zope API, and it's templating language, DTML.

After the reading of this this book, I feel ready for more complex implementations of web applications. That's just what I was looking for. I'd say I'm quite pleased.
As usual, your comments are welcome!

First, an obligatory disclaimer: I was one of the freelance technical reviewers for this book selected from the Zope development community.

Zope is one of today's most exciting development platforms, due to it's combination of power, simplicity, and extensability. I staked my job on using Zope to create a corporate Intranet a year-and-a-half ago, and it was the best career move I ever made.

This book is the first published 'dead trees' book about Zope. The overall tone is aimed at beginners and non-technical users, which is very appropriate even for more experienced web-developers, since Zope introduces new concepts and development paradigms. I found the 'Zoo' examples amusing and a refreshing change from the usual business-world examples.

The book stops short of explaining how to extend Zope using the Python programming language (which Zope is written in), but is nevertheless an invaluable resource on subjects such as DTML (Zope's dynamic templating language, similar to ColdFusion's CFML), Zope's web-based management interface, extending Zope through-the-web using ZClasses, and designing websites that take advantage of Zope's productivity-enhancing features such as Acquisition and Versions.

If you are building websites, whether Intranets, brochureware, community portals, or any other kind of site, Zope is a tool you must evaluate. It will do things you didn't know you needed, as well as solving problems that you do know you have.

Download Zope for free (yes, completely free)... and buy this book. You won't regret it.

Basic concepts are, I think, well presented. This is terribly important because even those of us who are used to working with web applications might find Zope very different from anything we've used before. This would earn it four stars except for one serious flaw: the book is rather dated. There is no coverage at all of Zope Page Templates or METAL, which are very important topics in today's Zope.

I reduced the rating to three stars because of essential deployment topics that I wanted to see covered that were also completely missing. SSL, the zope.conf file, using Zope in conjunction with Apache, for example. There's probably more, but I just don't know yet that I don't know them.

So I give it three stars for being useful, but having significant flaws. You are better off going to Zope.org and getting the latest on-line docs from there.

Zope (and Python) have gained wide spread audiences over the last couple of years and this book is a great companion to anyone that wants to get in on the hype or wants a book to review all areas of the Zope technologies. If you are unsure if you or your company should switch to a Python/Zope solution when developing websites, you should give this book a read and you will feel more confortable to give it a try.

The book is very easy to understand and it's not really a technical reference. It simply dabbles in many different areas in the Zope technology and covers them all very well. The author is very brief and you'll be able to see what Zope is all about after a few days of reading.

Zope is definately a new, innovative way of developing websites, much along the lines of java enterprise and other collaborative web application servers. If you program in PHP or Perl and want more colloboration, power, sleaker and well structured designs and faster development time, you should look into Zope and purchase this book.

This is the best Zope book out there today! Great job to the authors, Amos Latteier and Michel Pelletier, and it's technical reviewing staff who have done a great job making this book flow nicely and without error.

As mentioned in previous reviews, this is a well-written and well-thought-out introductory book to a very impressive open source web application server. I can only add two obvious caveats to what has been already said. 1. You will be able to accomplish some amazing things with ease after you finish this book, but it is a very thoughtful and careful tour of an iceberg's tip. When I finished the last page and saw how much there was to learn beyond it, I couldn't help but be a bit disappointed in my guides that so much territory remained after their part of the trip was done. Zope itself is a large, powerful program that will have many different types of users (content producers, administrators, developers, etc.). This book is an introduction for all of them, but truly sufficient as a stand-alone source for none of them, with the possible exception of DTML Content Producers. (n.b.: The Zope Documentation Project, under whose aegis this book was written, is addressing this need now for some users. A Developer's Guide and an Administrator's Guide are in various stages of completion.) 2. This is dead-tree documentation of a live and growing program, and as such was a bit out of date (Zope 2.3 vs. 2.4, for instance) even on its initial publication date. The authors appear to be trying to keep up (a new electronic update is available), but the speed of Zope development is somewhat mind-boggling. Zope Page Templates (ZPT) and the Content Management Framework (CMF) are extremely powerful and soon-to-be integral parts of the program not discussed in The Zope Book. A copy of The Zope Book purchased now will become more out of date quickly as ZPT and CMF gain importance, even if the authors update upcoming imprints. That's it. My caveats are obvious, and I still gave this thing five stars, so what the heck: go ahead and get it! Zope is an amazing tool and this will get you started. Good luck!

Save your money, visit zope.org and read the online docs because they are no better organized than this book is.

First, you would expect a book to significantly supplement the online and bundled documentation. This one provides little more than a re-write. For example, the book reveals little more about Zope system administration than the basic "double click" install. As far as building from sources, I at least expected the configure options to be documented. I was disappointed.

If you want to install any of the extensions, external resources or products Zope brags about being available (to cut development time), you will apply that saved development time towards figuring out how to install and take advantage of those "time savers."

Second, the book seems to assume all you will ever need or have is Zope. For those of us with existing web servers and databases, this book provides little compelling material to either employ Zope or about integrating it with existing infrastructure.

There must be a better book for Zope ... and there is:

The Zope Bible.

I started using Zope in April. Armed with the Zope Book on-line, I was able to build a Zope site for a professional association of 500 members with on-line conference registration and membership directory service. I want to thank the authors of the book for making this work possible.

Although Zope may be the leading open source Web content management platform, it has suffered from a lack of comprehensive documentation. This book, and similar titles from Linux Journal Press and Sams, have begun to address this issue, hopefully bringing greater interest in the platform.

The Zope Book was written by Zope developers and is targeted at Web developers and admins who have some experience with Web applications but possibly not content management technology.

Part 1, Introducing Zope, is designed to get the reader started with Zope, explaining how to download, install, and configure the software using the platform's graphical interface. The section describes what Zope can do, explains the basics of the Zope content object model, and introduces Zope's server-side templating environment, Document Template Markup Language (DTML).

Part 2, Creating Web Applications with Zope, gets into the meat of actually making Zope applications. The section talks about scripting with Python and Perl, user security searching, connecting to a variety of relational databases, metadata, and advanced DTML.

Part 3, Developing Advanced Web Applications with Zope, covers the Zope Enterprise Objects model, scaling and extending Zope, and Zope classes.

Appendixes include DTML and Zope API references and a guide to Zope resources, including mailing lists and Web sites.

The Zope Book is not the ultimate Zope refernce, and isn't meant to be.

If you've spent much time at all on the Zope site, you know who Amos and Michel are. This book is the accumulation of several years of work and an excellent public comment period in which real Zope users were encouraged to find errors/make suggestions/etc. I've been developing with Zope for about two years now and this is the book I wished I'd had when I started.

The Zope Book covers everything you'd expect in an Intro To type book, and has plenty of hands on workshop to get the reader into the real world of using Zope. It also makes a great reference book for more experienced Zope-istas.