Pyramid Books Published by O'Reilly

[Steve Piercy]

Howdy,

While at PyCon, an editor, Rachel Roumeliotis, from O'Reilly
Media informed @mcdonc that they would like to publish books
about Pyramid. At this point we don't have a lot of information
about the potential arrangement or what the books would cover.
Discussion amongst Pyramid folks about the matter is on GitHub.

https://github.com/Pylons/pyramid/issues/807

I am collecting discussion points and questions for Rachel.
Here's what I have so far.

* What kind of book about Pyramid do you think would be successful?
* We want the IP of Pyramid to remain the property of
Agendless/"The Foundation" (for lack of a better term).
* What level of control over the content would O'Reilly want?
* What level of ownership of the content would O'Reilly want?
* What kind of guidance would O'Reilly provide to the author(s)?
Editorial? Publishing?

Please reply with any comments.

In the next week I'll ask Rachel to schedule a Google meetup (or
whatever) so that anyone who has an interest in books about
Pyramid can participate while respecting her time.

Thank you!

--steve

--steve

[Robert Smallshire]

Have you considered leanpub.com? Two advantages: You can release the book progressively as it's written and you get to a substantially larger royalty than you would normally. I know two authors who have had good experience publishing technical books this way.  I guess the downside is you have to be bring your own editor and the marketing may have less reach. 

Rob

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[Mike Orr]

On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 3:14 AM, Steve Piercy
<steve.pi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> While at PyCon, an editor, Rachel Roumeliotis, from O'Reilly Media informed
> @mcdonc that they would like to publish books about Pyramid. At this point
> we don't have a lot of information about the potential arrangement or what
> the books would cover.

This is interesting. I was involved with two Pylons books, the
Definitive Guide and one which was never finished. I was a tech
reviewer for the former and a stand-in author for the latter. In those
cases, the book's outline and contract were set before I got involved.
This sounds like a better opportunity to Pyramid, since the
development team is larger and is being more fully engaged, and also
because the framework is more solid and less likely to need to change.

Most of Pylons' problems can be traced back to the original vision of
wanting to be like Rails, with the same level of batteries and magic.
That was how the future looked in 2005. The book dutifully expressed
that vision, although Pylons was from the beginning more modular than
Rails and the book also reflected that. The book started with the
0.9.5 vision and was updated to the 0.9.8 vision by the time it was
published, but the 1.0 vision was already starting to supercede it,
and then the Pyramid vision came soon after and totally changed the
paradigm. (Or rather, it expressed what we had been trying to do in
2005, minus the magic and higher-level batteries.)

Now Pyramid has been released for a few years, and I don't see any
major structural changes coming. What changes do we need if we're the
only framework that supports traversal, several template engines,
hooks and includes and tweens? Especially as it was able to spawn
Kotti, which is even more configurable every time you turn around?
(Kotti is what I'm studying now and trying to make a site from and
want to write some development documentation for.)

I don't have time to participate in this book but I like the
suggestions so far, both in content, IP boundary, and different
publishing paradigms (O'Reilly and Leanpub).

Yes, we need a book, or books. The documentation is a reference and
has to explain all the built-in features, both common and esoteric. We
have repeatedly failed to write beginners' docs. This is where a
commercial author/publisher can step in and write something "for
dummies", and explain things in a different way, and give different
examples of full-sized programs, and head out into the add-on sphere
beyond where the official docs can focus on. There's several books
right there.

So Steve Piercy, I wish you luck and hope it goes somewhere. And if
other prospective authors are looking into it over different
publishing paradigms, I encourage them to do so.

[Tamer Higazi]

Steve,
Nobody really wants to write a book about pyramid.... If you would say
"Zope", then I understand.


But honestly, the pyramid documentation is really written very good, the
same as the django docs, that I don't see any reason to write one.

Or do you have any idea to add anything in the book that is not
mentioned in the docs (guide) ?!

[Chris McDonough]

On Sun, 2013-03-24 at 16:39 +0100, Tamer Higazi wrote:
> Steve,
> Nobody really wants to write a book about pyramid.... If you would say
> "Zope", then I understand.

?

> But honestly, the pyramid documentation is really written very good, the
> same as the django docs, that I don't see any reason to write one.
>
> Or do you have any idea to add anything in the book that is not
> mentioned in the docs (guide) ?!

The existing docs are mostly written for an audience of people who
already know Python and web stuff. There's plenty of room for books
that don't make these assumptions. There's also plenty of room for
books that go into more depth about particular integrations of Pyramid
and other systems (e.g. SQLA, whatever).

- C

[Mike Orr]

On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 9:18 AM, Chris McDonough <chr...@plope.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2013-03-24 at 16:39 +0100, Tamer Higazi wrote:
>> Steve,
>> Nobody really wants to write a book about pyramid.... If you would say
>> "Zope", then I understand.

Steve wants to write a book about Pyramid. :) I would too if I had
time, and probably others also.

>> But honestly, the pyramid documentation is really written very good, the
>> same as the django docs, that I don't see any reason to write one.
>>
>> Or do you have any idea to add anything in the book that is not
>> mentioned in the docs (guide) ?!
>
> The existing docs are mostly written for an audience of people who
> already know Python and web stuff. There's plenty of room for books
> that don't make these assumptions. There's also plenty of room for
> books that go into more depth about particular integrations of Pyramid
> and other systems (e.g. SQLA, whatever).

That's exactly it. Beware of the blind spot, "The docs are good enough
for me, so they're good enough for everybody." *You* may have come to
Pyramid with a background in Python web development, or even just
Python, or just web development. Or you may be unusually talented in
understanding complex reference material. The issues is not that more
details need to be explained, but that the first half of the manual
needs to be explained in a different way (maybe several different
ways).

The Pyramid docs may be the same as the Django reference docs, but
still Django is touted as a framework that's "easy to learn" and
Pyramid isn't. Why is that? It seems to come down to Django having so
many tutorial-level docs, and books, and consultants, and the like.

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[Jonathan Vanasco]

1. I'd agree that the current docs are great. I wonder what a book
would be.

2. fwiw, friends who have written/edited tech books have said this:

you basically get paid nearly nothing / a vanity fee for your book.
it works out to less than minimum wage.

the terms get better as you work with a publisher more. once you do a
few books, it becomes worth it.


3. it's too hard to say this delicately, so i'm going to send the
blunt statements to address Mike's points about Django docs to him
personally. publicly... i think the bulk of django users I've met
would largely be scared of pyramid and not care for it. and that is
simply because they program in "Django" not "Python". it's a similar
phenomena to how many people program in "Rails" and not "Ruby". The
full-service frameworks have attracted a following of people who pick
up the frameworks but not the language -- and the level of behind-the-
scenes magic + coding style keep people from really using the actual
language. coding in many of these frameworks is more like configuring
an XML file than writing a program.

[Steve Schmechel]

In order to make creating a web application like "configuring an XML file", your framework must be very opinionated, which Pyramid is not.  I think there are two different audiences here and you are never going to change Django "configurers" into Pyramid programmers with a great book.

Maybe they would be better suited with a book on one of the opinionated frameworks built on top of Pyramid.  (Kotti, Ptah, Khufu, Akhet)  Those frameworks have made many of the tough decisions for them and, if one of them meets their needs, they just need a little help "configuring" it.

There is another, maybe smaller, set of programmers that do use Pyramid directly to either create an "opinionated" framework or to solve a problem that is difficult to do with other frameworks.  For them, extra books on integrating various pieces are very valuable, although whether that value adds up to enough to make it worth the authors time is another story.

Which takes us back to the first point of the OP:

* What kind of book about Pyramid do you think would be successful?

That is tricky because it may depend on what projects people are currently working on.  However, there probably is some common ground in topics like database back-end integration, error reporting, and long running process integration (judging from topics that come up often on this forum).

A list of possible topics could be put on an online poll and let current developers mark those that they have either struggled through in the past, would like more direction on, or anticipate using in the future.  An aspiring author could take the top picks from that list and develop a book that at least would have the interest of a good percentage of the current user base.  Likely that would translate also to a good percentage of future users.

However, it is unlikely that it will ever be the sheer number of people that might buy a Django book for the reasons mentioned earlier.

[Jonathan Vanasco]

On Mar 25, 12:35 pm, Steve Schmechel <shma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> In order to make creating a web application like "configuring an XML file",
> your framework must be very opinionated, which Pyramid is not.  I think
> there are two different audiences here and you are never going to change
> Django "configurers" into Pyramid programmers with a great book.

100% in agreement.

> Maybe they would be better suited with a book on one of the opinionated
> frameworks built on top of Pyramid.  (Kotti, Ptah, Khufu, Akhet)  Those
> frameworks have made many of the tough decisions for them and, if one of
> them meets their needs, they just need a little help "configuring" it.

I think the books do little in terms of "Configuring" and more in
terms of "reading on the couch and getting excited by it" , then using
it with a computer later/the next day. I thought about suggesting
that one or more frameworks are "annointed" as representations of
pyramid, and those are shown as a comparative "this is how you build a
messagebaord app".

> There is another, maybe smaller, set of programmers that do use Pyramid
> directly to either create an "opinionated" framework or to solve a problem
> that is difficult to do with other frameworks.  For them, extra books on
> integrating various pieces are very valuable, although whether that value
> adds up to enough to make it worth the authors time is another story.
>
> Which takes us back to the first point of the OP:
> * What kind of book about Pyramid do you think would be successful?

My concern is that those type of people aren't going to read a Pyramid
book. They're going through the docs. They're active on lists.
They've got the API to answer most questions.

I see a benefit of having a technical reference guide & best-practices
for Pyramid. I'm reminded of the Exim4 book ( on UIT Cambridge Press,
not the exim3 on o'reilley) - philip hazel did a stellar job
describing the nuances of SMTP , all the design decisions in exim ,
the specifics of routing , and then went into API and howto. It's one
of the best Technical Books I've ever had the pleasure of reading.
BUT... I got it in 2005. This was before broadband was widely
available , or we had things like autogenerated docs. In any event,
the existing "Narrative documentation" is like a condensed version of
the Exim book.

Anyone who is now using or considering Pyramid, is very unlikely to
buy or read a book -- They're the type of person who does RTFM
already. The "Sweet Spot" for book sales and evangelism, is going to
be addressing some section of the django market and people who are new
to python.

An idea that I think could work is something like: "Teach yourself
Python with Pyramid... the most powerful and flexible web framework".
Show how to build a simple db backed webpage using "raw" pyramid, and
then a framework or two, and then loop back into raw pyramid and show
how Pyramid lets you alter all the stuff that kotti/ptah/whatever does
in some way.

if you look at the reviews on Amazon for the various Django books, the
samples i looked at largely read like this: beginning programmers
praise them, intermediate to advanced ones say things like "reading it
cover to cover, it explained how/why various underpinnings happened"
and "the official tutorials are better".

anyways, my point is that I'd look at what people are buying/reading
the django books for and then write a book catered to them and those
needs. i don't see the current pyramid audience getting much out of a
book, but i do see the chance to develop and grow an audience.

[Chris McDonough]

On Mon, 2013-03-25 at 10:19 -0700, Jonathan Vanasco wrote:
>
> On Mar 25, 12:35 pm, Steve Schmechel <shma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > In order to make creating a web application like "configuring an XML file",
> > your framework must be very opinionated, which Pyramid is not. I think
> > there are two different audiences here and you are never going to change
> > Django "configurers" into Pyramid programmers with a great book.
>
> 100% in agreement.

Errr. I've written a Django app, and it wasn't anywhere near like just
changing a config file. It's a lot like writing an app under any other
web environment... requests, view callables, templates, integration with
3rd party libraries and system processes, etc. Pyramid and Django,
where they overlap, are very similar, and developers face the same
problems and use similar solutions.

But their overlap is pretty small. Pyramid does about 5% of what Django
does. You would think that would make Pyramid much easier to explain.
But its taken me ~800 pages to try, and still the effort doesn't please
everyone.

So I don't think there is any question whatsoever that a book written
from another perspective would be valuable, as clearly different people
learn differently. The challenge is only in identifying how that book
would differ from the existing docs. That's not much of a challenge,
however: "Pyramid and SQLAlchemy"... "Pyramid and MongoDB"... "Writing
Web Services with Pyramid"... "Creating Mobile Applications With
Pyramid"... "Pyramid for New Python Developers"... "Pyramid for Django
Programmers"... etc. It's awful easy to come up with a list of
potential topics that will contextualize using Pyramid for some audience
better than the existing docs will ever be able to.

- C

[Mike Orr]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 9:35 AM, Steve Schmechel <shm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> In order to make creating a web application like "configuring an XML file",
> your framework must be very opinionated, which Pyramid is not.  I think
> there are two different audiences here and you are never going to change
> Django "configurers" into Pyramid programmers with a great book.
>
> Maybe they would be better suited with a book on one of the opinionated
> frameworks built on top of Pyramid.  (Kotti, Ptah, Khufu, Akhet)  Those
> frameworks have made many of the tough decisions for them and, if one of
> them meets their needs, they just need a little help "configuring" it.

Thanks, that's the part I forget. That there are a lot of of Django users aren't like Pyramid users; they don't want to delve around under the hood, and they're not thinking about scalability or long-term maintenance, they just want to get a site built easily and quickly. The magic encourages them to think it is all easy, but then they're depending on magic, which as Guido would say works until it doesn't. The reason I see a market opening for the large number of non-hacker web developers is, I think it's possible to explain Pyramid in a way that's as easy as that, and that's what we've never succeeded at. The fact that people see Pyramid as "hard" even with significant improvements to the manual (compared to early versions of Pyramid), shows that something is missing. That "something" may be books or articles or marketing or such, probably some combination.

For instance, a beginners' book could focus on just the basic features; e.g., not getting into traversal, sticking to Mako+SQLalchemy, and adding a few essential opinions like a form library. A more advanced book would say a lot about traversal, with examples, and explain different use cases for contexts, and different ways to make resource trees, and the advantages/disadvantages of merging the resource tree with the ORM. Many Pyramid users have trouble with traversal, even those who are somewhat hackerish. So that's a good target for a book. Especially since that would stand out in a bookstore: one of the few books/frameworks that really facilitates CMS-like applications. I can see a book on Kotti as it matures. Ptah I don't have as much experience with, but possibly. The two fit somewhat different niches. Kotti is more "a CMS that happens to be extendable", while Ptah is "an application framework that happens to have a minimal CMS" (although it may have advanced since then). They would reach different target audiences and thus different books. There could be room for a book that has a few chapters for each, but that would violate the "We want one way to do it" rule.  Better would be a book that's mainly about something else, and just has overviews of Kotti and Ptah and other things.

Akhet, no. Akhet is a retro future, trying to impose the then-familiar Pylons way on Pyramid. It's like the early 1960s visions of the space-age future, which look quaint now. But it's not even cute like a Quisp ceral box is; it's just limiting.

Just as Linux went through a "for hackers only" phase and now there are distros that are easy to install and zero-configuration. But it's still easy to take the hood off, and especially, nothing is blocking or discouraging you from doing so.  Pyramid seems to fit the same dual niche, at least potentially.

[Siddhartha Kasivajhula]

An idea that I think could work is something like: "Teach yourself
Python with Pyramid... the most powerful and flexible web framework"

Just to build on this from my perspective - one thing I've noticed about pyramid is its adherence to python standards and best practices - encouraging the use of tools like distutils, setuptools, pip, PyPI, virtualenv -- all this stuff from the python ecosystem that any competent python programmer would eventually need to learn and would be that person's eventual bread and butter. tbh before pyramid I didn't use most of these things with any frequency.

A book that talks about coding in python with a goal to situate the reader inside the python ecosystem, with a clear understanding of what all the standard resources are and what the best practices are -- taught via the use of pyramid as an awesome web framework (everybody understands the web as a platform, what better way to learn a language than to build a web application in it) -- could be pretty useful angle, and not really covered by existing documentation.

my 2 cents,

-Sid

[Whit Morriss]

Pyramid, A Salty Curmudgeon's Approach to Web Development

d. "whit" morriss
Platform Codemonkey
wh...@surveymonkey.com



On Mar 25, 2013, at 12:47 PM, Chris McDonough <chr...@plope.com>
wrote:

[Jonathan Vanasco]

On Mar 25, 1:47 pm, Chris McDonough <chr...@plope.com> wrote:
> Errr.  I've written a Django app, and it wasn't anywhere near like just
> changing a config file.  It's a lot like writing an app under any other
> web environment... requests, view callables, templates, integration with
> 3rd party libraries and system processes, etc.  Pyramid and Django,
> where they overlap, are very similar, and developers face the same
> problems and use similar solutions.

*you* might have, but the majority of django apps i've seen are much
more "step and repeat" and "write to django". i'm not talking about
what you *can* do, but what most people do. very few touch system
processes or non "django-" libraries. the coding style is typically
very enforced , which is great... but when you see code from some
django apps, there's very little Django and a host of plugin/
configuration calls + database/form schemas.

a good example is the TastyPie library for API management. So much
has been abstracted. The bulk of the work is more akin to
"configuration" than programming. ( http://django-tastypie.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorial.html
)

I've sidetracked this conversation enough.

all of Chris's ideas are great. "creating highly scalable web
applications with pyramid" is also buzzwordy.

[Tjelvar]

Dear all,

Just thought that I add my two pence worth. I am not a web-hacker, I'm a scientist. I use Pyramid to expose my science as web apps/services.

If I am not a web-hacker then why don't I use something that is "simpler" than Pyramid. Personally, because the science that I want to expose does not fit easily into the more "opinionated" out-of-the-box solutions.

So what is the difficulty with using Pyramid? Some people believe that it is all explained in the docs, and I'm sure it is, but Pyramid forces users like me to think harder about some of the underlying concepts of what they are trying to do.

Let me explain by some illustrations.

Let us start with the "hello world" example. When I look at it my first question is: what on earth is wsgi? It took me a couple of hours of surfing the web and reading to get my head around this. If this had been explained neatly in a book for "beginners" it something that I would have benefited from.

After getting my head around wsgi I realised that I really needed to get a better understanding of what http was. Up until this point all I had needed to know about http was that it was something that my URLs started with, oh and then there were get and post. Whilst reading up on http I found it useful to get to grips with the WebOb module. Again, Pyramid makes certain assumptions that the users are familiar with these concepts, so if there was a "beginners" book for Pyramid users I think that it could benefit from some introductory sections on these topics.

I did have the idea of putting some of these thoughts into a book and started writing some of it down in a google doc. If anyone is interested I'm happy to share it with them. Not because I think that what I have written is particularly good, but because it may give some inspiration. Let me know.

Finally, I would like a Pyramid book to contain lots of small, self-contained example applications. I find it easier to understand what is going on from reading example code rather than looking at API or the "official" documentation. However, the problem with example code is that it does not always fit into what one wants to achieve, I therefore find it most productive to look at many small, self-contained to examples to work out what the similarities and differences are.

[Tamer Higazi]

Hi Chris!

Am 24.03.2013 17:18, schrieb Chris McDonough:
> On Sun, 2013-03-24 at 16:39 +0100, Tamer Higazi wrote:
>> Steve,
>> Nobody really wants to write a book about pyramid.... If you would say
>> "Zope", then I understand.
>
> ?

I code all the time with Python and Pyramid, and I didn't find yet the
documentation of bluebream really helpful, decribing the application
server and it's modules in detail.

the pyramid docs in comparison are 10x better and very great, and cover
the framework really in detail with good samples all the time. Or, do
you doubt that this is not true.

>
>> But honestly, the pyramid documentation is really written very good, the
>> same as the django docs, that I don't see any reason to write one.
>>
>> Or do you have any idea to add anything in the book that is not
>> mentioned in the docs (guide) ?!
>
> The existing docs are mostly written for an audience of people who
> already know Python and web stuff. There's plenty of room for books
> that don't make these assumptions. There's also plenty of room for
> books that go into more depth about particular integrations of Pyramid
> and other systems (e.g. SQLA, whatever).
>

I mean, reading a pyramid book, without knowing the basics of python
doesn't make sense at all, no ?!


Extending the documentation explaining the basics about POST, GET and
it's protocols is only a chapter to extend.


If you tell me, that you want the whole picture then start with HTML,
CSS and OOP Javascript and then jump to pyramid.

Putting this in ONE and ONLY book, take you away from the scope. Then
it's no more a pyramid book, then a 3-subject book, which is nonsense.


APress has very good books you'll find everything you need.


> - C
>

Tamer

[Thomas G. Willis]

I'm kind of late to the discussion but what Tjevlar said really strikes a chord with me. 

I believe that a book about pyhon and the web would be an awesome resource to have.

I'm not a writer, but I've been kicking around an outline for a book for a couple of years, but before I get to that, this is my story....

 When I came from ASP.net to python via turbogears and then pylons many years ago, there was WSGI, paste, pastedeploy, pasteob etc... and setup.py and easy_install. not to mention the plethora of libs that turbogears bundled together that you needed to get familiar with. It really can make a newbie feel out of their element. The first edition of the turbogears book wa enough for me to complete the project I was working on, but I did not feel like I was a python developer, I wasn't confident I did it right. If you asked me to explain any piece of code I wrote I couldnt tell you. I just followed the recipe described in a chapter the best I could and then banged on it until it worked.

There were a few information sources that helped me become (i hope) a python web developer. And based on the questions that come to stackoverflow and other venues I'm not sure they are very well known, thus an opportunity....

One such resource I stumbled on was Agile development tools in python on showmedo http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/series?name=mcfckfJ4w it did a really good job of demonstrating a workflow for developing python packages. I still use paster to this day to generate my python package skeletons. Though I realize the information is somewhat outdated, I am not aware of something similar that may be more up to date.

Another resource that made everything click was when I stumbled on "A do it yourself web framework" in the paste docs that his since been updated for webob. http://pythonpaste.org/do-it-yourself-framework.html by which I learned enough about wsgi to understand  the value in using pastedeploy ini's and what I could do with url map and wsgi middleware and pipelines etc.... It felt like a new found super power.

At which point, being on that foundation of knowledge pyramid, (bfg at the time) was an easy sell to me. it provides powerful tools to build an app on top of, and it stays out of my way. 

So maybe a book that takes a programmer from 0 to web developer through a series of layers/chapters that justify why you are choosing pyramid for your application and how much power you have at your disposal would have a market. 

Again not being a writer myself, I just have this outline which I guess would represent how I would teach someone how to code web apps with python. from the ground up instead of top down. I could imagine having fun with the language of the book in the same style as learn x the hard way maybe.

Anyway, here's my outline from my org file

*** TODO Web Development from the ground up

    A book about web development using python/javascript that starts

    out at the lowest level and builds on it so that the reader has

    the knowledge of web frameworks and how they work and be prepared

    to build amazing applications.

    all examples in python 3 and pyramid. 

**** History

***** HTTP

***** CGI

***** WSGI

***** Web Frameworks

**** Future

***** Web Sockets

***** tornado/gevent etc....

**** Introduction to HTTP

***** Request

****** GET

****** POST

****** PUT/DELETE/OPTIONS

******* Form 

******* Multi/part

***** Response

****** Status Codes

****** Body

****** Cookies

****** Auth: Challenge/Response

**** Web Application Development

***** Introduction to WebOb

***** Template Engines Survey

***** Example: Directory Listing

***** Introduction to WSGI

****** What it handles

****** What it doesn't handle

****** Patterns

******* Middleware

******* Composite

******* ???

***** Example: Directory Listing with Auth Middleware

***** Wrap Up

**** Request Routing

***** sending a request to a function to handle it

***** Routes/Regex based

***** Resource Based

**** Persistence

***** SQL/SQLAlchemy

***** NoSQL/wild west

**** Caching(key value store)

***** Memcached

***** Redis

**** Ajax

**** WebSockets

**** Offline Processing(Task Queues)

[AD.]

On Mar 23, 11:14 pm, Steve Piercy <steve.piercy....@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am collecting discussion points and questions for Rachel.
> Here's what I have so far.
>
> * What kind of book about Pyramid do you think would be successful?

Also a bit late to this....

As a part time mediocre Python coder and occasional Pyramid tinkerer
that hasn't yet built anything substantial or permanent yet, I could
very well be in the (target?) market for Pyramid books.

While I think there could be a market for a beginners "Python web
development (with Pyramid)" book that also introduces a lot of the
surrounding ecosystem like WGSI, virtualenvs, Python distributions,
ORM basics, templates etc - I have a sneaking suspicion that Pyramid
doesn't attract the kind of people who would need a book like that. ie
Pyramid newbies usually aren't complete newbies to Python or web
development.

The kind of book that I personally would find useful is a cookbook
with a slant towards architectural topics. The recipes could be less
numerous and more indepth than in typical O'Reilly cookbooks. ie
various different ways of putting together slightly more complicated
apps/sites in nicely maintainable ways. Kinda like the cookbook in the
online docs but with a bigger picture focus. And recipes that show the
benefits of some of Pyramids more advanced features in practical ways.

The Pyramid docs are awesome from a low level completeness point of
view and they have enough tutorial style stuff in there to get
intermediate coders like me up and running without much trouble. But
after having your eyes opened, it's always the 'what next?' or 'how
could I make my code smarter and better organised?' type questions
that hurt my brain to think about :)

Or for someone wanting to write a more focussed intro book using
specific technologies - a "RESTful HTML5 development with Pyramid/
Cornice/AngularJS" book would tick all the buzzword boxes (and I'd
probably still buy it).

--
Cheers
Anton

[Whit Morriss]

I'd love a cookbook along the lines of "Solving Web Development Problems with Pyramid and friends". Something that would cover all the basic and not so basic things one encounters when building HTTP focussed applications without annoying pedantry of stepping through a contrived example application. Ideally move from simple stuff (single file app!) to the general (authorization, persistence, forms) to the more complex or fuzzy (REST api design, realtime etc). Cover the dev and deployment toolchain.

I think the thing many people outside this list do not realize is that it's now possible to develop as quickly or as broadly in Pyramid as anyone does in django or rails if you know what to use and how to use it. I tried to encourage Joe to blog more on this, but he was like "dude, I'm doing a start-up".

-w

[Malthe Borch]

On 4 April 2013 23:54, Whit Morriss <wh...@surveymonkey.com> wrote:
> I'd love a cookbook along the lines of "Solving Web Development Problems with Pyramid and friends". Something that would cover all the basic and not so basic things one encounters when building HTTP focussed applications without annoying pedantry of stepping through a contrived example application. Ideally move from simple stuff (single file app!) to the general (authorization, persistence, forms) to the more complex or fuzzy (REST api design, realtime etc). Cover the dev and deployment toolchain.

I have not read it, but isn't most of the tool chain covered in Tarek
Ziade's book:

http://amzn.com/184719494X

It's a good idea with a cookbook, but I do feel that in this day and
age, a really good website would be worth more than a paper-based
cookbook. Think syntax highlighting, crowd-sourced, annotatable, easy
to search for. There's Stackoverflow, but it's very Q/A.

That doesn't mean that there isn't room for a real book, too. But
paper's got strengths and weaknesses. I think paper works best when
you can sit and read it and not feel you need to apply any of it
straight away. You're just building up an understanding about the
subject matter.

I thought this morning about how I got into Python, and how I got
relatively good at it. And I guess mostly I just tried to figure out
how Zope worked and why – a pretty long journey that ultimately wasn't
very satisfying – but perhaps more importantly, I met other developers
that gave me some unique perspectives on programming.

I'm thinking that a good book might help developers tinker with the
"right" technology – and provide unique perspectives on the field in
general. Like an extended version of Chris' design decision, and more
generally applied.

\malthe

[bismigalis]

I think Pyramid is not worth a book. It is small and very well documented.

Something like "Writing webapp in Python using Pyramid/SQLAlchemy/Deform/Chameleon" is more worth to publish.

[Tamer Higazi]

Am 25.03.2013 16:09, schrieb Jonathan Vanasco:
> 1. I'd agree that the current docs are great. I wonder what a book
> would be.
>
> 2. fwiw, friends who have written/edited tech books have said this:
>
> you basically get paid nearly nothing / a vanity fee for your book.
> it works out to less than minimum wage.

Education never pays out, more or less entertainment industry does.
Become a horror novel writer on the same quality like "Steven King"
does, and you become famous.

>
> the terms get better as you work with a publisher more. once you do a
> few books, it becomes worth it.

do you think you'll kick out some 100k $/ￜ ?????

>
>
> 3. it's too hard to say this delicately, so i'm going to send the
> blunt statements to address Mike's points about Django docs to him
> personally. publicly... i think the bulk of django users I've met
> would largely be scared of pyramid and not care for it. and that is
> simply because they program in "Django" not "Python".

I did long time ago in django... why they are scared and for what, I
really don't know.

Most coders always believe that if they find something that makes them
really satisfied, it should and must be the best of the best.

It doesn't get into their minds, that there are other frameworks or even
application servers that would serve them well or even better in their
projects they are coding at.

it's a similar
> phenomena to how many people program in "Rails" and not "Ruby". The
> full-service frameworks have attracted a following of people who pick
> up the frameworks but not the language -- and the level of behind-the-
> scenes magic + coding style keep people from really using the actual
> language.

This is because they make simple web stuff, like templating. At the
moment you create RIA applications, or something that has to play deep
with JSON and object databases, then the thing gets really difficult.

coding in many of these frameworks is more like configuring
> an XML file than writing a program.
>

just when they make simple stuff.... however, as I said, when the jobs
are getting really difficult, and complicated, then the games over.


for example:

- server side image manipulation
- extensive play of javascript frontend with python backend
- RIA application coding, where javascript sends a request, and the
dataset serverside has to be prepared for the client properly for
further presentations






Tamer