While the book target audience is claimed to be everyone interested in becoming more familiar with how to professionally manage Plone sites, I’ve found most of the book very, very basic. If you know how to use a terminal, a text editor and a browser, you’re likely not going to have many problems following the detailed tiny-step-by-tiny-step instructions provided in the book. However, the reader might feel sometimes like a script-kiddie, executing commands and adding sections to his/her buildout without really understanding fully what he/she’s doing (and why) and thus unable to confidently change the configuration. This is specially true in the last chapters of the book.

The writing style is always casual and easy. Alex gets directly to the point without much bla-bla. The downside is that Alex sometimes uses some concepts (like Five, FSDVs or CMF) in the book without previous introduction or pointers to further documentation. But of course, you can always rely on Google. For some questions the reader might have, Alex has opted for a short-answer/medium-answer/long-answer schema that, while the division is not always perfect, helps the reader to decide how in deep does he/she want to go.

The book is a gentle introduction to buildout and product installation (including basic theming) for absolute beginners, and that’s what the first half of the book is all about, but I had expected a longer treatment of load balancing schemes, cache proxies and settings for optimal performance, load testing, multimedia streaming, development-production products and buildout deployment, apache/nginx configuration for Plone, multiple ZODB mount-points and ZEO configuration, among others. These are the kind of things I would expect an advanced Plone site administrator to master, and what we need proper, comprehensive documentation for.

Summing up, if you fall inside the target audience outlined in the paragraph above, you’re going to like this book. If you’re looking for more hard-core site administration stuff, check out Planet Plone and other online docs.

Time for a new review of a Plone book! This time it’s Plone 3 Multimedia, by Tom Gross, and published by, guess who… Packt Publishing! One would say that Packt has a really good marketing team. :P

The mistake in the title is here strikes once again, since most of the book, if not it all, will apply also for Plone 4, but Packt continues following this policy.

First think I thought was… do we really need a whole book about multimedia in Plone? The answer is, well, there is enough material, enough multimedia-related products for Plone out there to write a book about the topic if you want to.

One thing I don’t understand is what the target audience is supposed to be. The “Who this book is for” section claims that (please Packt don’t sue me for copyright-related issues ;):

This book is for Plone integrators who want to extend the core of Plone with multimedia features. It gives no introduction to Plone and readers should know how to set up a Plone site using a buildout. The book can be read and understood well even if the reader is not a Python developer, though some examples have Python code included.

The book starts giving definitions of what a CMS or what multimedia is and the different types of multimedia elements we can stumble upon, so you think it’s going to be soft, but it soon dives into using multimedia in Zope Page Templates and Python code, and later uses some more advanced concepts (e.g. automated testing, traversers, marking interfaces, zope events…) without (IMO) proper introduction.

Is not that I can’t accept the reader is required to have some former Plone knowledge — what I don’t understand is the mixture of really-newbies with more advanced coding material.

I would have appreciated a kind of requirements story to give more coherence to the content as a whole, something like what happens in the Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook or Proffessional Plone Development: a fictitious client that presents some requirements for a to-be-developed Plone site.

Plone 3 Multimedia doesn’t follow this pattern, and the result is a different structure, a reference presenting and briefly explaining different products to add multimedia features to your site, like the whole Plone 4 Artists (p4a) suite, plonetruegallery, Slideshowfolder, collective.flowplayer, Plumi, Vice, collective.uploadify or Red5, among others.

The two last chapters deal with what I think are vital topics when dealing with multimedia: storage and caching. In the storage one, I miss some more guidance about which storage system choose in every situation and why, instead of just a list of different available products with storage-related features.

Finally, I don’t think the appendices, covering multimedia and syndication formats, licenses and links for getting more help, are worth it. We already have Wikipedia, Google searches and all, so if one wants to read about, say, Ogg Vorbis, one ends here or here, with a lot more info that what one can find in the corresponding appendix of the book. All these pages could have better been employed in explaining more deeply the more advanced technical concepts, for example.

To sum up, I find this book good for “advanced” integrators or developers who are looking for an overview of the different available multimedia products for Plone. For the rest, I’ve not doubt you can learn something from it, but perhaps others fit your profile better.

The list of reviewers, comprising Martin Aspeli, Alec Mitchell and Emanuel Sartor, being as they are core and very active developers, automatically made me think this was going to be an accurate and up-to-date book.

This is the second book in the market about modern development with Plone, after Martin Aspeli’s Proffessional Plone Development. And after having skimmed through it (if you try to proof-read this kind of books from top to bottom your brain can explode), I can say that it’s probably going to become a classic invaluable reference as PPD already is.

Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook spans over 350 pages full of useful tips, set-up instructions and step-by-step coding approaches to solve specific use-cases (that’s why it’s called “cookbook”). Even if the book title says Plone 3, I think it’s just a Packt policy – one can be sure that most of the contents (if not all them) will be valid for Plone 4 too, and the authors even included some special instructions for Plone 4.

The book show-cases the development of an hypothetical digital newspaper with Plone, covering the whole process: From installing Python and Plone in Linux or Windows (Mac OSX specifics aren”t covered in this book) to preparing the production environment, passing through the installation of useful development tools like ipdb, DocFinderTab or plone.reload, creating content-types using ArchGenXML, paster-aided plain Archetypes or Dexterity, internationalizing and localizing the product, building XML-RPC interaction with other systems, and more (see the full table of contents). All the features coded include automated tests, what is a Very Good Practice and will help devs to be less afraid of writing tests.

The book is organized in a recipe-list fashion, in chapters, every recipe including “getting ready”, “how to do it”, “how it works” and “there is more” sections. Sometimes the separation of concerns between these sections is not very clear, but one can expect a series of short steps in “how to do it”, to use as reference, and some brief explanation in “how it works”.

In my opinion, this is not a book for beginners. Even if there are some explanations in the “how it works” section of each recipe, they are almost always quite brief, and can certainly make you have to re-read and Google for more documentation often, if you really want to understand how the Zope Component Architecture, ZPT, skin layers, z3c.forms, etc. work. I see it more as a reference book for more advanced developers, who can also discover in this book some tricks and approaches they didn’t know before – I certainly did!

Summing up, this is a really useful reference for folks with previous developing experience in Plone. My sincere congratulations to the authors for their hard work to make this happen – I’m sure it will hit the shelves of every active Plone developer!

Both the author, Erik Rose, and the technical reviewers are well known and respected in the community. I’ve chatted more than once with two of the reviewers, Steve McMahon and Denys Mishunov, and I know they’re quite skillful and competent, so you can expect the book to be correct and well-written.

I must admit that, at first, I was a bit annoyed with the step-by-step recipe-style of the book. Being a Physics student, I’m used to read texts where the main points of the theory are explained, but the step-by-step procedure is often left as an exercise to the reader. Having to follow closely a list of steps makes me feel like a script-kiddie: somebody who executes a series of steps without actually understanding what is she/he really doing.

However, Erik has taken care of providing a lot of contextual explanation about the steps, with comments about the different options you have and why would you prefer to choose one or another. Moreover, the just-follow-these-steps approach is not so heavily used after the two first chapters.

Although the title of the book suggests that people in the educational context are its only target public, you can learn a lot from its suggested approaches even if you aren’t into education. Being very, very practical, it covers a freaking impressive list of tasks/features: making academic courses available on-line, a directory of personnel, setting-up a blog and a forum, publishing audio and video, creating forms easily, theming a site and managing a production system.

I wouldn’t have covered the theming and the sysadmin stuff, since it’s quite technical and there are already (or are coming) good book references on these subjects, including the Plone 3 Theming by Veda Williamson, Practical Plone 3, or the upcoming Plone 3.3 Site Administration by the popular Alex Clark. By the way, Alex, please tell Packt that this title is not attractive at all marketingly-speaking — people will think that the book only applies to 3.3!

Unlike other books, which are quite bare-Plone centered, a lot of interesting add-on products are documented, more or less extensively: FacultyStaffDirectory (of which Erik is an active contributor and therefore even provides tips about future development!), p4a.Calendar, Scrawl, QuillsEnabled, PloneBoard, collective.flowplayer, p4a.video, p4a.audio, PloneFormGen, z3c.jbot and CacheFu, among others.

Erik doesn’t simply provide general technical manager advice, but also tells you about good practices for content editors based on his previous experience and known pitfalls. What is even more impressive, he sometimes points you to some tickets in Trac about open issues! While this would be more suitable for on-line documentation, it reflects the active involvement and time Erik has spent on investigating what he’s writing about. Good work, Erik!

The book is full of evangelism, specially in the first chapter, where it comes in loads. While it shows that Erik (and the reviewers?) is really passionate about Plone, I guess that who bought this book is looking for info about how to use the product, not marketing stuff, and perhaps these pages could have seen better use with some images, more extensive explanation of a certain feature, or just removed and the price of the book lowered. But this is only the opinion of someone who’s already convinced of the coolness of Plone. Erik also takes the opportunity to expose his political view about the issues with buildout, installation and packaging.

The writing style is clear and always fun. Sentences like “Who can resist puppies? They are heart-meltingly cute and loads of fun, but it’s easy to forget, when their wet little noses are in your face, that they come with responsibility. Likewise, add-ons are free to install and use, but they also bring hidden costs.” make you smile and remind you that some people in the Plone community have a good sense of humour and are crazy enough to publish this kind of stuff in a technical book. :)

Kudos to Erik — while I was certainly biased about reading a book for non-developers and just for Education, you managed to make me learn new stuff and enjoy doing so!

I’d like to thank Packt Publishing for providing me a free review copy of the e-book for my reading pleasure. The 2nd chapter, Calendaring, is available from their site free of charge, in the case you want to take a peek before considering to get the book.