Zope Bible

Rating:
Summary: Not a book to help you get started
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: This is the Zope Book I Was Looking For
Review: I have a fair amount of experience in Python, but I had not yet had time to really get into Zope despite being intrigued by it for some time. When the opportunity presented itself to do some work with Zope, I jumped at the chance... only to find myself somewhat lost in a thicket of new concepts and vocabulary.

After initially trying with "The Zope Book" and "Zope Web Application Development and Content Management," I could create simple applications with dtml and pythonscripts, but I still felt like I wasn't really grokking Zope: I felt that the things which I created were not terribly scalable or portable. There is an extensive section on ZPatterns in the end of "Web Application Dev," but I gave that a pass when I found that ZPatterns are not supported in the current Zope releases.

This book was exactly what I needed to get past that wall: The section on application development in Python allowed me to leverage my existing knowledge to create some products that have now gone into full production use. I now feel much more confident building, extending, and integrating Zope apps.

This book is well written; It answered the questions that I came up with almost as soon as I came up with them, making it an easy read. The code listings were helpful without being prohibitively long. The book doesn't coddle the reader with excessive detail on simple topics, but gives just enough to understand. I loaned this book to a friend who only knows Perl and C, and he found the included Python intro enough to bring him up to speed on Python as well as Zope.

All that said, there is no substitute for actually sitting down with Zope and playing with it. This book will not make you an expert on the complete system, but it will make Zope transparent enough that you can continue your education on your own.

Rating:
Summary: Very great book on Zope DEVELOPMENT
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Straddles a difficult audience
Review: If you don't own any Zope books, get this one and forget the rest.

I had high hopes for this book and they were almost met. I've been a PHP, Perl, Python and ASP developer for a number of years and I continue to be excited by the promise of Zope. I know it's a brilliant tool but, time after time, the documentation lets it down. So you'd think that there would be a number of great Zope books to fill the information void.

Not a chance!

Zope books are like Internet books were in the mid 90's. There's so much fat and so little meat for professional developers and you feel like they've been rushed out the door to meet some arbitrary deadline. Trying to get a decent Zope Product tutorial with a good explanation of how and why was almost impossible until this book came along.

Chapters 6 and 7 show you how to build an honest to goodness Zope Product. They're well written building blocks and made it worth the price of the book for me.

Rating:
Summary: Chapters 6-10 are worth the cover price
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Not quite a Bible, but definitely a worthy addition
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: You Need to Learn the Python Stuff!
Review: 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.