[Zope] Keeping my promises - writing tutorials for Zope

Chris McDonough chrism@zope.com
Fri, 26 Jul 2002 18:26:22 -0400


> 1.  Object Publishing (how to make an object appear on the web via a URL.
> 
> That seems elementary, and it is.  Moreover, there is some instant gratification
> and the hope that they can do something useful (and are not wasting their time).

Amen! I've written a lot in the new Zope Book revision about what it 
means to "publish an object", which in turn led me to need to write to a 
chapter about object orientation.

The original aim of the Zope Book was to provide "instant gratification" 
to its reads by way of introducing simple applications straight away. 
But I've found that, by far, the people who are reading and commenting 
on the book want more often to know *why* something is the way it is 
than how to do it once by example.  So I've taken the book and added a 
few chapters to it, and added a lot more explanations of the examples 
and whatnot.  As a result, however, people don't actually get to build 
an application until about the 5th chapter.  I think this is ok.

I think what is necessary to fill the gap here is a "Zope Cookbook" much 
like the Perl Cookbook, which isn't really narrative about "how to learn 
Zope", but narrative about "how to to X in Zope".  It'd be cool if 
someone were to make a deal with Adam to use the contents of 
ZopeLabs.com as the basis for such a cookbook.

-- 
Chris McDonough                    Zope Corporation
http://www.zope.org             http://www.zope.com
"Killing hundreds of birds with thousands of stones"