Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears: Using Python to Create Ajax-Powered Sites

by Kevin Dangoor, Mark Ramm, Gigi Sayfan

Dear PHP, It s over between us. You can keep the kitchen sink, but I want my MVC. With TurboGears, I was able to shed the most heinous FileMaker Pro legacy solution imaginable. It has relationships... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0132433885
• ISBN13: 9780132433884
• Release Date: February 2011
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 472 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A masterpiece!

Yes, there are tons of errors. But they are all minor and good for the readers; for these errors are not conceptual blunders that mislead readers. They are errors that make readers think harder. No, I am not advocating that authors should inject errors into their books on purpose. I am saying that minor errors are not so critical as to be given undue weight in judging a book. The book and the authors deserve ten stars because of the insight, clarity and happiness they bring.

Easy to read. Lots of MochiKit material.

For what it's worth, I participated in the proofreading process and I still purchased the print version. I happen to believe that Python will be the next programming language of choice for mainstream IT, and TurboGears makes it easier to build maintainable, cleanly architected web applications using Python. This book will be a foundation element of the growing TurboGears ecosystem, as it nicely complements the online documentation for TurboGears and the various frameworks that TG builds atop. The authors have a very casual narrative style to their writing, which greatly aids the overall readability of the book. It's almost as if you're reading the transcript of a top-notch training session. The base text is accompanied by a number of diagrams, tables, example snippets, annotations, sidebars, and screenshots. If you like to skim through your books, you'll feel right at home with this one. The books covers the entire vertical application stack from JavaScript down to basic Sqlite database installation and setup, and the entire application creation lifecycle from installing TurboGears to production deployment. I think that there is a second unintended audience for this book, namely those developers interested in building Ajax apps using MochiKit, even if they aren't using TurboGears (or Python) for their backend server development. MochiKit is the brilliant and highly acclaimed JavaScript framework created by Bob Ippolito that "makes JavaScript suck less". MochiKit is featured as a core element of the TurboGears application stack, and this book features more than 80 pages dedicated to MochiKit. In closing, the authors did a great job on this book. I highly recommend it. --Mike

Great book for a great framework

I just bought the book, but I have read several chapters already and I can't wait the book to arrive to read the rest. Turbogears is, IMHO, one of the best frameworks around, and the best python based. If you like python Turbogears is the right framework for you, if you don't know python give it a try. With "Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears" you will go from 0 to 100 in no time, and at the same time you will support the project.

Tutorial and detailed info all in one

When writing a computer book, there's usually a tension between creating a reference work and creating a tutorial-style book. This book takes on both approaches, which I think is exactly what's needed in a book for TurboGears. The first half of the book teaches you TurboGears from the perspective of how a couple of realistic applications are put together. I've always found it productive to read through existing code to learn how to get things done, and the first half explains the basics of getting things done nicely. TurboGears comes with a lot of software, and the second half of the book goes into detail on how to use the various components that TG includes. Gigi and Mark spend quite a bit of time going through SQLObject, I covered MochiKit, Remi Delon (project leader for CherryPy) helped out with deployment topics, Simon Belak (who has done a lot of work on TG's error handling) helped out with some TurboGears controller-related sections. We put in a lot of work to cover all of the parts of the system in enough detail that you'll find the answers to most questions in the second part of the book. Mark did a great job of writing and pulling this book together. It is a great resource for users of TG, and I'm proud to have been a part of its creation.

Build Web Applications in Python the easy way

At PyCon 2005 there was a lot of talk about how fragmented the Python world's web development efforts were. People complained that attention was spread too thin, and that innovation wasn't being rewarded because it just took too much time to wade through all the options. But without that diversity TurboGears would not have been possible. TurboGears brings together some of the best web programming tools available in Python -- and in the process moves the state of the art forward in web framework world. Before TurboGears I used ASP, PHP, Struts, and Rails, and I found thinks that I liked in each of those worlds. But TurboGears won me over with little things like the powerful, extensible, and clean template syntax, the ajax support, and the well designed API's. This book covers TurboGears as a whole, with an emphasis on getting you up to speed quickly, and then diving into real-world open source projects rather than continuing to use toy examples. We also have in-depth coverage of several existing python libraries SQLObject, CherryPy, MochiKit and Kid, which are valuable to uses of these tools -- even outside of th TurboGears context. I'm rating the TurboGears framework 5 stars, but as the primary author I'll have to leave it up to you all to rate the book itself.