Build Better Web Apps with Pylons
In 2008 James Gardner wrote "The Definitive Guide to Pylons", a comprehensive reference manual for the Pylons web framework community and the first complete set of documentation. It was published by Apress at the beginning of 2009.
If you are considering hiring us in the UK and would like to get a feel for the sorts of skills we have we are more than happy to send you a FREE copy of the book, just get in touch.
The book aims to be three things in one:
- A comprehensive reference manual
- A Pylons tutorial
- A coherent, topic-based guide which can be read from start to finish
The book is therefore broken down into chapters covering specific topics but also has three tutorial chapters which teach the reader how to build a wiki system so that by the end of the book they have a fully working product called SimpleSite.
The chapters are arranged into three parts.
Part 1: Getting Started
The first part of the book introduces readers to the approach Pylons takes. It explains how to install Pylons before going on to how to start the server to run a simple application. The book covers the key global objects through which Pylons exposes its functionality and goes on to explain how to track down and solve problems with Pylons' innovative interactive debugger.
Once readers have understood the basics the book takes them on through the use of Mako templates, to form handling and validation, and finally accessing databases with SQLAlchemy.
Part 2: Advanced Pylons
With the knowledge the reader has gained from Part 2 they will be in a good position to build simple web applications but for more sophisticated production sites there are more things they need to know. Part 2 takes the reader through URLs, routing and dispatch, Unicode, internationalisation and localisation, documentation and testing.
Since JavaScript and CSS are such an important part of modern web development, the book has a chapter dedicated to these topics.
Part 3: Expert Pylons
The third part of the book takes the reader through more advanced topics that will be required knowledge if they plan to deploy a Pylons application or develop more advanced solutions with Pylons. It covers logging, deployment, authentication and authorization, WSGI and Pylons' internal architecture.
Part 3 also takes the reader through the final steps of the SimpleSite tutorial and shows how to package the code so that it can be used as a starting point for other projects.
Read the book online
You can read the full table of contents here
The book is released under the GNU Free Documentation License which allows it to be freely downloaded and redistributed.
The license also allows the book to be modified and re-published and as a result of this, the first four chapters have been translated into Spanish. It also means that unlike other authors, I'm very pleased to see Google publishing a copy of my work online without my permission!.
