The Open Source Zone

This book has maybe six pages of useful info. It tells how to make a custom portlet.

Much of what it describes is obvious from looking at the Plone interface. Moreover, I suspect that the author may not know Plone or Zope very well.

Save your money. The other Plone books are better.

If you're looking to buy this book now for use with a modern incarnation of Plone, you may want to rethink your decision and look elsewhere. Aside from being written against Plone 2.0 (Plone is currently at version 2.5.1, with 3.0 looming in a few months), and thereby having some tips and instructions that no longer work as originally intended, the book includes some typographical errors (as do many books), a few of which are horrible and misleading. I've actually done everything from inquiring with the publisher regarding errata (you won't find any on the publisher's site for the book) and writing to volunteer the corrections myself (which went unanswered).

The book is an excellent introduction to Plone and quite helpful as a kick-starter, but I would not by any means recommend it for use as a "bible" for what Plone is, can do, and can be customized to do today.

If you are a designer who wants to know how to customize Plone's look beyond changing colors and fonts, you'll be disappointed in this book. Sure, the introduction is still good, but chapter 6 (for example), which instructs you to work with the Plone Base Properties file is giving you an outdated method, not well suited to upgrades and maintenance. I believe that stylesheets are the way to go, now...but I'm still trying to figure it out, no thanks to this book. The instructions for adding slots in Chapter 5 were just impossible to follow and did not even vaguely work. Yes, the text is in English, but the descriptions bear little resemblence to the Plone 2.1+ experience.

This book will, however, give a somewhat glossy overview of the entire application. I would get a recent version of Andy McKay's book, and look elsewhere for customization help.

The book starts out promising, with the first chapter being a very good quick intro to CMS and Plone and the types of things that CMS can do for you. However, once you start getting into the specifics, it quickly become clear that this book is now outdated. Many of the examples are hard to follow because the current version of Plone has different options or features. Also, the examples cover only the "low hanging fruit" - the easiest of tasks, many of which you can figure out on your own just by sitting in front of a browser and navigating Plone using common sense. (Which I ended up having to do, since the examples in the book are outdated.) You won't find the real-world answers you need in this book. Need to authenticate the users based on some authentication you already have, such as LDAP? This isn't the book for you. Only 1 page is dedicated to user and group admin, and that is basically a rehash of what you see on the screen in that admin panel. Want to know how to allow users to publish their own work rather than wait for the admin to approve it? Not in the book, you have to just figure it out by experimenting.

This book does have its moments but a large portion of it is easy to learn just by playing with Plone on your own.

The premise of the book is very good. The book gets you up and running on Plone if you're a beginner, and explains concepts and features well. That until you hit one of the many snags. There are several parts where the instructions are missing, vague, or utterly contradictory. It will definitely send you on a "troubleshooting trip" or you might just have to skip the section altogether. Just a warning.