Zope Bible: Bernstein, Michael, Robertson, Scott, Coedit Development Team: 9780764548574: Amazon.com: Books (original) (raw)
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Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2002
Having a little experience of python, but none using zope, I purchased this book because of the other reviews I read here.
The first few chapters are very good and have helped me 'sell' zope to management because they describe why zope is such a good applications environment.
However, when it came to helping build applications, unless you want to build products, then this book contains almost nothing on scripting or using external methods (and hence the python functions outside the safety of zope). There is just a few pages on zope methods and only a 'hello' world on using external methods.
I was hoping to get a zope based application up and running fairly quickly to convince my colleagues that we can use zope effectivley, and for that I needed to access existing application (and hence external data using external methods).
I don't doubt that once you become experienced this book serves as a good reference book and a good guide for advancing to more sophisticated applications, but for an inexperienced zope applications developer it is not at all helpful.
18 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2002
Format: Paperback
The truncated version of my full review (space prohibits the whole thing, full version lives [on the web]):
What's Bad?
Zope Bible is a misnomer. There is a lot of great information here, but many sections are to shallow to be of any use. A more appropriate title would be Python for Zope or Advanced Zope Development with Python or some such. It claims to be beginner to advanced, but it is not organized in a manner that will be useful to Zope newbies and the things a beginner needs to know most often are missing or covered in such little detail as to be as good as missing. They could have dropped the first 3 chapters and used that space to flesh out some of the later chapters and perhaps do a second case study.
What's Good?
The sections that are good are very good. It's well written, they obviously have a deep understanding of Zope, and I didn't catch any technical errors. The writing is clear and effective. If you're already familiar with Zope and already have The Zope Book and The Book of Zope, then this would be a great next book for getting more into the Python parts of Zope. I particularly liked that they built an actual useful product from end to end in the course of several chapters explaining how different features of Zope can be used. The reference sections on CM and DBM are great. It's nice to see some aspects of Zope that are woefully underdocumented get addressed (Templates, DB integration, Security, Searching) even if some of them aren't in as much detail as I'd like.
11 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2002
Format: Paperback
The Zope Bible took me where I needed to go in learning Zope. While the Zope Book was quite excellent on the use of Zope and the Zope Management Interface (ZMI) for doing work, it was far, far too thin on the scripting and programming front.
The Book of Zope had very little I found useful.
I bought the Zope Bible after looking it over in them bookstore for about a half-hour. It is not for Zope newbies, for sure (though a particularly hardy newbie could probably grok it OK). But if you've done some Zope work and you find yourself hemmed in by the fences of the ZMI and hampered by a lack of ability to understand how the Zope objects interact with one another and with the outside world, this book is exactly right. It has answered more than a dozen questions I had that I had asked on the Zope mailing list to no avail.
The book is clear, well-written, cleanly organized and quite complete.
I agree it's probably not worthy of the monikder "Bible" but it is easily the most comprehensive book on Python devleopment in and for Zope that you'll find. And, believe me, you need to learn Python to make most effective use of Zope for anything beyond toy apps. Zope's ZClasses are a fragile gossamer. The real power is in the Python programmability of the thing.
21 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2002
Format: Paperback
If you want to do Python Products in Zope, you need this book.
The nice thing about Zope is that it's written in Python, but it's hard to find your way through the thicket of web modules to the elegant programmming language underneath.
Zope Bible contains the best step-by-step howto I have found for putting your application logic into Python classes (where it belongs) and then wrapping it up in the Zope persistence and display machinery.
The rest of the book consists of good clear explanations of the essential Zope components, including an excellent discussion of connecting to SQL databases.
14 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2002
Format: Paperback
I think this book is quite strong in the sense that
it provides detailed information on Product developments and
inside workings of Zope which is not available in other titles.
I've god all the books on Zope and find that this is the best
one for developers. Besides this book, programmers should also
look at the Zope: Web Application Development book by New Riders
which is also a good book!
3 people found this helpful
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