The Book of Zope

Rating:
Summary: This book picks up where "The Zope Book" left off...
Review: "The Zope Book" is the official documentation from Digital Creations (the makers of Zope). While an absolute necessity, it didn't cover everything I needed to get completely off the ground with Zope. This is the only Zope book I've found so far that fills in the gaps and did it in a way that was comprehensive and well-written. The other Zope books I've read felt "thrown together." This is an absolute must-have for any Zopista.

Rating:
Summary: This book picks up where "The Zope Book" left off...
Review: "The Zope Book" is the official documentation from Digital Creations (the makers of Zope). While an absolute necessity, it didn't cover everything I needed to get completely off the ground with Zope. This is the only Zope book I've found so far that fills in the gaps and did it in a way that was comprehensive and well-written. The other Zope books I've read felt "thrown together." This is an absolute must-have for any Zopista.

Rating:
Summary: A comprehensive and "user friendly" introduction to Zope
Review: The Book Of Zope: How To Build And Deliver Web Applications, the contributing authors and specialists drawn from the Berlin and Washington D.C.-based Beehive organization have collaborated to produce a comprehensive and "user friendly" introduction to Zope, including its own Web server, transactional object-oriented database, search engine, web page template system, web development and management tool, and comprehensive extension support. Here laid out in a completely accessible text is everything needed for Open Source website developers using Zope for Windows and most Unix-based platforms. The Book Of Zope is strongly recommended to anyone seeking to learn how to install Zope on their system or server; develop their site and manage site content; use DTML to create dynamic content; manage users, roles, and permissions to secure their site and provide personalized content; integrate and publish data from relational databases; use ZCatalog to index and search their site contents; and extend Zope through Python products.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Graphics and Presentation
Review: The graphics and layout of this book make it a joy to read. I own several good Zope books but this is the first one I turn to when I need to look something up.

The information is organized logically and easy to find. There is a separate appendix in the back with a lot of the DTML and other Zope syntax listed in separate tables. For instance, last night I used it to look up the DTML string functions.

A great benefit is the separate chapter that provides an introduction to Python. I had also bought a separate Python book to help me get up and running with Zope, but I really didn't need one because this book gives you the basics that you need.

This book is really a joy. If you can only afford one book I even recommend this one instead of the The Zope Book.

Rating:
Summary: Nice Idea TERRIBLE Execution
Review: Where are all these good reviews coming from? Did they read the book and try to follow the instructions and examples? I tried and couldn't.

Now I'm a tech savy person and own a large library of tech books, so normally I don't have a problem with even the most dense and poorly written tech guides. This one, however, has proved useless.

The most glaring problem, one that you will find on almost every other page is that their figures and diagrams don't match up with their text. Moreover, you'll often even find that the figure doesn't even match up with the text cited with figure. Very confusing! At present I'm equating learning Zope to learning unix - real test of understanding complexity; a poorly organized text makes this process more difficult.

So, what do you do? Well, don't buy this book. The 'Zope Book' is very good and downloadable in pdf format. Also, the Zope Bible, which I've just started is very good. For more advanced topics try the 'Zope Web Applications and Content Management'. Also, Zope comes with a very nifty tutorial.

Well, hope this helps. Don't make the same mistake i did in buying this book.