The Open Source Zone

I bought this book as a Zope Newbie. I am past 7 chapters at this point and have been able to understand all the concepts presented and also conjured up a small example of my own, to which I am incrementally adding to. The book boasts of the following:

- Well presented chapters with incremental addition of newer concepts.
- Good coverage of Beginner, Intermediate as well as Advanced concepts.
- An application that has been developed incrementally throughout the book, chapter by chapter with downloadable source code.
- Concisely written while being an easy as well as entertaining read.
- The author actually responded to me when I posted a question on the Zope Users Mailing List (see zope.org).

Zope is paradigm change from existing app-server technologies and the author does a good job of helping the reader absorb this. My only beef with the book was that the application source code had some problems with the Zope 3.2 version but this really isn't that big of a deal since one can either simply run it on a previous version of Zope or else, if feeling adventurous, fix the problem.
Definitely Recommended.
-Sid.

Perhaps the best known Zope application is Plone, for content management. Zope also has a thriving community centred around Zope.org. So perhaps you are interested in learning to program Zope?

This book is one of the most comprehensive descriptions of Zope, version 3. The author is German, and perhaps not being a native English speaker helps the content of this book. Example codes are given, not just for English speakers. Plus, there is a strong section on internationalisation or localisation. He explains how to do this, with practical cases like showing the same numbers in different ways. Continental Europe uses a comma for the decimal point and a dot for the thousands separator. Simple enough to handle. But also enough to hopefully make you aware of how to use Zope to customise for your expected audiences.

This book is at once thorough, brief, and concise. This is by far the best technical books i've read on any subject.

I have been interested in Zope for almost a year now, but even as a seasoned programmer I was intimidated by its labrythian complexity. I struggled for weeks reading the free Zope material and learning almost nothing. This book presents the material in an accessable manner while shying away from the horrible puns and awful jokes present in so many technical books. This book would be a bargin at twice its price.

Even the books physical construction is outstanding -- it is a hard back with a solid binding, and the cover appears to be some sort of tyvek which is an industrial material you may recognize as the nearly indestructable plastic the US Postal Service uses in some of its mailers. For the older among us, you would recall the material being used as 5.25" floppy sleeves.

A last note, another reviewer mentions having trouble getting the book in the US, I recieved it in about a week with the standard free shipping.

This is the second book on Zope 3 to be published, and where Stephan Richter's book is designed to be more of a cookbook, this is a polished and impressive presentation of the Zope 3 software that will suit many better as a first text. The index leaves a bit to be desired, but it is otherwise an excellent effort.

Springer, the publisher, is a very well respected German publisher; it's really too bad for us Americans that the high price and slow delivery times for this book associated with overseas shipping may deter purchase: it should be a first choice for an introduction.