I'm kind of late to the discussion but what Tjevlar said really strikes a chord with me.
I believe that a book about pyhon and the web would be an awesome resource to have. I'm not a writer, but I've been kicking around an outline for a book for a couple of years, but before I get to that, this is my story.... When I came from ASP.net to python via turbogears and then pylons many years ago, there was WSGI, paste, pastedeploy, pasteob etc... and setup.py and easy_install. not to mention the plethora of libs that turbogears bundled together that you needed to get familiar with. It really can make a newbie feel out of their element. The first edition of the turbogears book wa enough for me to complete the project I was working on, but I did not feel like I was a python developer, I wasn't confident I did it right. If you asked me to explain any piece of code I wrote I couldnt tell you. I just followed the recipe described in a chapter the best I could and then banged on it until it worked. There were a few information sources that helped me become (i hope) a python web developer. And based on the questions that come to stackoverflow and other venues I'm not sure they are very well known, thus an opportunity.... One such resource I stumbled on was Agile development tools in python on showmedo http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/series?name=mcfckfJ4w it did a really good job of demonstrating a workflow for developing python packages. I still use paster to this day to generate my python package skeletons. Though I realize the information is somewhat outdated, I am not aware of something similar that may be more up to date. Another resource that made everything click was when I stumbled on "A do it yourself web framework" in the paste docs that his since been updated for webob. http://pythonpaste.org/do-it-yourself-framework.html by which I learned enough about wsgi to understand the value in using pastedeploy ini's and what I could do with url map and wsgi middleware and pipelines etc.... It felt like a new found super power. At which point, being on that foundation of knowledge pyramid, (bfg at the time) was an easy sell to me. it provides powerful tools to build an app on top of, and it stays out of my way. So maybe a book that takes a programmer from 0 to web developer through a series of layers/chapters that justify why you are choosing pyramid for your application and how much power you have at your disposal would have a market. Again not being a writer myself, I just have this outline which I guess would represent how I would teach someone how to code web apps with python. from the ground up instead of top down. I could imagine having fun with the language of the book in the same style as learn x the hard way maybe. Anyway, here's my outline from my org file *** TODO Web Development from the ground up A book about web development using python/javascript that starts out at the lowest level and builds on it so that the reader has the knowledge of web frameworks and how they work and be prepared to build amazing applications. all examples in python 3 and pyramid. **** History ***** HTTP ***** CGI ***** WSGI ***** Web Frameworks **** Future ***** Web Sockets ***** tornado/gevent etc.... **** Introduction to HTTP ***** Request ****** GET ****** POST ****** PUT/DELETE/OPTIONS ******* Form ******* Multi/part ***** Response ****** Status Codes ****** Body ****** Cookies ****** Auth: Challenge/Response **** Web Application Development ***** Introduction to WebOb ***** Template Engines Survey ***** Example: Directory Listing ***** Introduction to WSGI ****** What it handles ****** What it doesn't handle ****** Patterns ******* Middleware ******* Composite ******* ??? ***** Example: Directory Listing with Auth Middleware ***** Wrap Up **** Request Routing ***** sending a request to a function to handle it ***** Routes/Regex based ***** Resource Based **** Persistence ***** SQL/SQLAlchemy ***** NoSQL/wild west **** Caching(key value store) ***** Memcached ***** Redis **** Ajax **** WebSockets **** Offline Processing(Task Queues) On Wednesday, March 27, 2013 10:19:20 PM UTC-4, Tjelvar wrote: > > Dear all, > > Just thought that I add my two pence worth. I am not a web-hacker, I'm a > scientist. I use Pyramid to expose my science as web apps/services. > > If I am not a web-hacker then why don't I use something that is "simpler" > than Pyramid. Personally, because the science that I want to expose does > not fit easily into the more "opinionated" out-of-the-box solutions. > > So what is the difficulty with using Pyramid? Some people believe that it > is all explained in the docs, and I'm sure it is, but Pyramid forces users > like me to think harder about some of the underlying concepts of what they > are trying to do. > > Let me explain by some illustrations. > > Let us start with the "hello world" example. When I look at it my first > question is: what on earth is wsgi? It took me a couple of hours of surfing > the web and reading to get my head around this. If this had been explained > neatly in a book for "beginners" it something that I would > have benefited from. > > After getting my head around wsgi I realised that I really needed to get a > better understanding of what http was. Up until this point all I had needed > to know about http was that it was something that my URLs started with, oh > and then there were get and post. Whilst reading up on http I found it > useful to get to grips with the WebOb module. Again, Pyramid makes certain > assumptions that the users are familiar with these concepts, so if there > was a "beginners" book for Pyramid users I think that it could benefit from > some introductory sections on these topics. > > I did have the idea of putting some of these thoughts into a book and > started writing some of it down in a google doc. If anyone is interested > I'm happy to share it with them. Not because I think that what I have > written is particularly good, but because it may give some inspiration. Let > me know. > > Finally, I would like a Pyramid book to contain lots of small, > self-contained example applications. I find it easier to understand what is > going on from reading example code rather than looking at API or the > "official" documentation. However, the problem with example code is that it > does not always fit into what one wants to achieve, I therefore find it > most productive to look at many small, self-contained to examples to work > out what the similarities and differences are. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
