[Zope] Best Zope book for Developers?

Terry Hancock hancock@anansispaceworks.com
Tue, 3 Jun 2003 19:59:47 -0700


On Monday 02 June 2003 01:32 pm, Dylan Reinhardt wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-06-02 at 12:14, Stefan H. Holek wrote:
> > Don't get fooled into thinking that you 
> > can build a clean site with DTML. ;-)

> Sure you can.
> Just don't use DTML as though it's meant for significant logic.

> > Try to learn about filesystem-based 
> > products as early as possible.

> Agreed.  This is where the real power of Zope is... and where heavy use
> of DTML pays off the quickest since you've got unrestricted Python
> available to run all the logic.  :-)

Absolutely agree, and unless it has been improved a lot for the next
edition, this is where the Zope Book lags, so I wouldn't really recommend
it to someone who plans to be "a Zope developer" and not just a
"a Zope site developer" (though it's apparently quite good for the
latter).  Of commercial books, I'd recommend the "Book of Zope"
for this, even though it may be a bit behind development.

Of course, the best source is not a commercial book, but the online ZDG:
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZDG/current/index_html

This is an awesome resource for anyone developing products,
and it has made my life a *whole lot* easier!

Also, remember each version of Zope has an up-to-date API manual
embedded in it.

Dieter Maurer also maintains a (possibly incomplete?) copy of a
manuscript online, which is also quite useful, especially on some
of the stickier internals of object publishing.  His "DocFinder" product
is a useful resource that extends the available API documentation
by allowing you to do more introspection on your site.

Learn how to load Zope from the python interpreter as well -- this
will allow you to use interfaces and introspection tools to find out
complete APIs.  This is very very useful with Zope because of the
huge accumulation of object methods by multiple-inheritance 
(which makes working them out by code-inspection to be really
really painful -- I think this is what motivated the "Interface/Component"
architecture for Zope 3).

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com