April 12, 2010
It took me a while to finish reading the book but here we go.
I wasn’t disappointed by the book and absolutely sure that it delivers on its promise to show that Grok can be an excellent fit for many kinds of Web development projects.
I think I’ll have to finish my Grok based blog now :)
Grok is largely based on Zope Tookit and that’s a very powerful set of libraries developed over many years that provides support for forms, full text search, authentication, i18n, security, components, persistence, testing, and many more.
Main distinguishing Grok concepts emphasized by the book:
- component architecture
- object database (ZODB)
- object publishing and traversal
- convention over configuration and do not repeat yourself (DRY) principle
The book introduces a simple “to-do” application to the readers. Gradually the application grows with new features like storing data in object database, forms, full text catalog search, security, component architecture.
There is a separate chapter devoted to integration with relational databases. This is especially important topic for Grok because traditionally Zope and Grok were tightly bound to ZODB.
All in all it’s been a pleasant read and I think it’s a great introduction to Grok web framework.
P.S. I may sound very optimistic regarding Grok and Zope, but I can’t do anything about it – I have a soft spot for Grok, it’s an excellent piece of software :)
Enjoy it!
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Posted by Ruslan Spivak
February 26, 2010
I’ve been asked by PACKT publishing to review a new book Grok 1.0 Web Development.
I gladly accepted their proposal. For those interested – yes, they sent me a free PDF version of the book, but I would buy the book anyway because it is about the project I love and associate myself with even though I’ve not been actively participating in it recently.
Personally I think that the release of this book is a major event for the whole Grok community. Having comprehensive documentation for people just starting with a smashing Web framework Grok is of utter importance.
What’s interesting is that I’ve been thinking about writing a book on Grok myself, but Carlos de la Guardia beat me to the punch and after skimming through the book I’m glad he did :)
What I liked instantaneously about the book is the presence of a chapter on integration with relational databases, the topic that in the Zope world was kind of obscure in the past.
When I finish reading the book I’ll post a full review so stay tuned and meanwhile you can take a sneak peak at the book by reading a freely available Chapter No 5: Forms
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Posted by Ruslan Spivak
March 2, 2009
I’ve just finished reading excellent book Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software
If you are involved or plan to be involved in developing any system that must be available 24 x 7 x 365 then you owe it to yourself to read this book.
The key ideas you should understand are:
- life of software only begins when you release it into production
With that in mind the book is a treasure trove of useful advices how to make your system scale and succeed in production.
The book resonates with my own personal experience in developing and maintaining critical Python application and many things that Michael Nygard describes I learned the hard way: blocked threads, socket timeouts, integration point failures and latency, asynchronous handling, caching, database growth and of course “cold shivers” you get when the system goes down.
While book is sprinkled with notes about Java related issues it’s nevertheless technology agnostic which makes it a valuable source of information for every developer.
It gets two thumbs up from me.
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Posted by Ruslan Spivak
