Posted by Brad Allen on Sun Nov 13, 2005:

This page is for comments about the second Zope 3 book, titled Web Component Development with Zope 3, by Phillip von Weitershausen. Because that name is so long, I will refer to it here as Philikon's book (that's the name used by the author on the Zope 3 mailing list and IRC chats).

Philikon's book answers a lot of the questions missing from the earlier book, the Zope 3 Developer's Guide. I would strongly recommend any seriously interested Zope 3 newbie purchase this book. I say 'seriously' because the price demands seriousness. It retails for $60, and even deep-discounter Nerdbooks.com can offer only a small discount from this obscure publisher. I consider this price worthwhile for anyone with an earnest desire to learn Zope 3, since Zope 3 is a powerful professional tool with a challenging learning curve.

The physical quality of the book helps justify the price you get a high quality durable hardcover with quality paper and typesetting, making it a pleasure to browse and read.

Of course, this book will become increasingly obsolete over time. I'm not sure why the publisher decided to make the book in such a physically high quality format, given the temporal nature of most computer books. Parts of Philikon's book are already outdated, such as the bits about Services. I suspect some parts will remain useful for a long time, but I'm not sure which parts. Maybe the author will weigh in on that subject in the near future.

In any case, for the time being I'm grateful to have a resource like this to help me learn Zope 3. I had already spent many hours with the other book, the Zope 3 Developer's Guide, and found that it omitted numerous basic subjects necessary to getting started with Zope 3. Philikon's book, on the other hand, seems to have hit those missing points, such as Zope Page Templates, site management, detailed info on how to work with interfaces and adapters, and user management and authentication. It also explained a lot of the same concepts as the Zope 3 Developer's Guide, so I consider it to be a more complete book overall.

The examples for the book can be downloaded here: http://worldcookery.com/Downloads(approve sites)

Here is an errata page addressing errors in the text of the book: http://worldcookery.com/Errata(approve sites)

Additionally, a page was accidentally omitted from the appendix, so he provides a PDF of the missing page. http://worldcookery.com/News/MissingReferencePage(approve sites)