[Zope] O'Reilly to publish Zope Book

[Michel Pelletier]

Greetings,

I'm pleased to announce that Dan York, the Linuxcare Certification
Program Manager, and myself, have come to an agreement with O'Reilly and
Associates to author a Zope book.  

The book will be published under a not-yet agreed upon Open Content
license.  This means that during the evolution of the book, you will be
able to view and download the material for your own information needs.
We hope that this also means you will kindly help point out mistakes or
gaping holes in the material before it is printed by the publisher.  One
of our goals is that this book will benefit from the same community
involvement that has made Zope such a great success.

Since before I started working at Digital Creations, I've had a Zope
book in mind.  Of course, I wasn't the first to think of it; Paul and
Hadar had in mind a 'Bobo Book' (Bobook?) for a while.  My original
material was called 'The Zen of Zope' and was defiantly high-fiber,
developer oriented material.

I met Dan York at the LinuxExpo this year.  I gave him a tour through
Zope and he showed me the kinds of things that Linuxcare was doing to
support the linux community.  When he found out I was working on a book,
he was interested immediately in co-authoring it.  Dan has published
books with Que in the past, and is key in authoring training and
certification materials for linux and linux courseware.  Dan and I began
working on a 'new' outline to present to publishers.

When we started talking to publishers, we realized that our outline was
much too complex, and that what Zope really needed was a gentle
introductory book.  Advanced or reference books may come later, but
first there must be a simple, introductory book that will stand the test
of time and multiple releases of Zope!  This is where Paul stepped in,
he helped take our outline and bring it down to the level that it needs
to be at.  I'm hoping that lots of community members will have a hand in
the final product, even if their contribution is just a comment on the
work.  Comments will be strongly encouraged!

There is no set title or release date for the book.  It will not be any
time soon, of course, and we will give everyone several months warning
before publication time.  O'Reilly cannot take advanced orders for
books, so please don't contact them with your credit-card in hand, the
people on the order lines won't even know what your talking about. ;)

-Michel