Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook is a new book on plone development from Packt publishing open source. After receiving it, I decided to take a quick glance to it. The book features 364 pages, which makes it quite a big book for its price, organized in a cookbook approach, making it a very useful book.
Though the book is not written in a clasical style, because of its cookbook approach, there's a progression in the recipes, as we can notice in the index:
- Chapter 1, Getting Started
- Chapter 2, Using Development Tools
- Chapter 3, Creating Content Types with ArchGenXML
- Chapter 4, Prevent Bugs through Testing
- Chapter 5, Creating a Custom Content Type with Paster
- Chapter 6, Creating Lightweight Content Types
- Chapter 7, Improving Product Performance
- Chapter 8, Internationalization
- Chapter 9, Adding Security to your Products
- Chapter 10, Improving User Interface with KSS
- Chapter 11, Creating Portlets
- Chapter 12, Extending Third-Party Products
- Chapter 13, Interacting with other Systems: XML-RPC
- Chapter 14, Getting our Products ready for Production
As you can notice from chapter titles there's a progression we can follow through the book.But thanks to the cookbook approach we can easily find the recipe we need and use it. Note that it's advisable to have knowledge on Plone, as the book doesn't stops on explaining the basic concepts.
Don't misunderstand this, the book is very thorough, it starts with the installation process, in Linux and Windows. The book is also very well explained, but basic knowledge is advisable so you can make the most from the book, as it's not a beginners book.
One of the most interesting chapters in the book is chapter three, where we can learn how to create content types using ArchGenXML, which provides a graphic interface which we can use to create content types for our site. Though this is quite an automatic process, in the chapter we will also learn how to customize the generated code, between other useful things.
On chapter four we will see some testing techniques, useful for make our site bug free. The chapter features how to create test suites using ArchGenXML, create doctests with iPython and Zope, also Selenium, functional testing.
Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook also has a chapter on performance, chapter seven, where we will learn how to install CacheFu, tweak code, and test server loads.
Another one of my favourite chapters is chapter 8, featuring internationalization. This is something very necessary in any site, and in this chapter we will find some useful recipes to achieve it. Like using i18ndude, using zope.i18n, translating content and setting language options.
Chapter ten was a very nice surprise, as it includes the use of KSS (Kinetic Style Sheets), if you want to learn more about KSS you can take a look to their site, and if you want to learn how to use it with Plone, you should really been reading this Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook,
Of course there are many, many, other recipes in the book, like using skin layers, customizing browser templates and files, interacting with other systems, writing a production buildout and so on.
A very advisable book if you are on Plone development, take a look to it here.
