The Open Source Zone

I did enjoy this book, but it sums up the Geek Overload route most bare-metal Python coders take in promoting Plone as a CMS.

The book is 568 pages long, but after page 144 it pretty much turns into a Python coding book with a few bones tossed out as to how to annotate your HTML to point at all the Python scripts you're supposed to write for new products, archetypes, etc.

I had hoped for a thick TAL section with explanations on how to customize existing portlets and templates to summarize News items with different display attributes, but again, yet another Python programming book fills up the manual.

Please, someone could make LOTS of cash writing a Plone applications book without all the bare-metal Python injections. Where is *that* book?

Not involved too much of programming stuff. Good for starter. I found it easier to understand than "Begining Python". There is also online version of this book out there. Free of charge.

This book provides an ok introduction to Plone, but it couldn't answer a lot of my questions when I was trying to use it to learn how to program in Plone. It is NOT a definitive guide, more of a tutorial explaining how to do a number of different, specific tasks. My opinion of this book is probably also influenced by my negative opinion of Plone itself. There are far less convoluted content-management systems available.

Well written introduction for those who like gentle approach. Of course what's gentle for one person is harsh for another. Three months ago I didn't know anything about python, zope and plone. I found the book too thick for the amount of information it contained, especially because it was aimed mostly at people working directly with the web interface to zope and plone. When writing my new plone product - a tool in python - I soon ran out of knowledge based on the book. For me a lot more of serious python examples of Plone API would work better. So if you are an experienced programmer, with knowledge in dynamic languages (Lisp) and want to learn about this interesting new web technology you are probably better off looking for online resources on plone.org and zope.org than buying this book.

This book is a good introduction and a good reference for plone. Although it may be a bit dated due to the newest release of plone, the bulk of the information applies to all versions.