Martin Aspeli 'Professional Plone Development'

Programmers at our company have acquainted themselves with Aspeli's book: some of them have already read it completely, others have just looked through the most topical issues. Nevertheless, all of them agree that the explanations provided give an in-depth understanding of the concepts.

Plone-developers often have to sift through bits of online howtos and other people's examples to understand how to do certain things. When any problems turn on, there is a need to look for necessary information on different programmers' forums. Such searches are in most cases time-consuming or even hit-or-miss. Professional Plone Development fills the gap between the inadequacy of online howtos and the need to read through someone's example to find out how a particular thing is done.

Both beginners and experienced developers can find lots of useful information in this book. Professional Plone Development is undoubtfully worth reading, taking into consideration the fact that new 3.0.x Plone versions include lots of novelties. Martin Aspeli's writing style is clear, to the point and neutral. The author uses many examples, case studies with explanatory notes which can help people to understand Plone development better. A list of concepts that the book covers is amazing and the material is relevant and up-to-date.

Vitaliy Podoba:

• "Professional Plone Development has made a very positive impression on me, even though I haven't read it to the end yet. I think that everything described here is very understandable. The explanations are nice, and examples are really helpful. The book will be interesting both for beginners (especially 2-nd chapter) and for experienced Plone developers. That's because Plone 3.0 has lots of new features and not everything can be comprehended so easily, or found in new Plone code. For me, this book is a kind of a guide to development with Plone 3.0."

• "Chapter 3 explains how to built development environment in a way, different from a usual one (downloading and installing Zope, then the same procedure being done to Plone, after that all necessary products installation). Development environment can be built with Python ZopeSkel package, that possesses all the necessary information in buildout.cfg file. Thus, having this file, we can have the same development environment automatically set to all developers. All the product installed will be identical, of the same version."

• "What amazed me the most, is that in addition to explaining the concepts, and how to work with them, the author provides us with reasons for their existence, why they work this and not another way. For example, it has always been unclear for me why such text files as Products/CMFPlone/profiles/default/plone_various.txt are in GenerisSetup folders, what their role is. I couldn't find any information about this online, but now I have the answer to my question form Aspeli's book: we need such files because of the way GenericSetup executes import steps. If an import step handler has been registered and run once, it will be called for any subsequent profiles (even from different products) that are imported."
• "Another interesting fact is that portlet customization can be achieved through <plone:portletRenderer /> directive, that I have never tried earlier."

Summing up all written above I should state that our programmers have gained a lot of relevant information. And there is a countless number of examples that can be provided here. They will definitely get even more trying all described in the book in practice working in Plone 3.0.