Reviews for Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears: Using Python to Create Ajax-Powered Sites (Prentice Hall Open Source Software Development)

1. useful but flawed

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2007

   This book has the potential to be great, but it's let down by atrocious editing. The text is full of inconsistencies and typos. This is particularly unfortunate since TurboGears relies on naming conventions for some of its magic. You don't know when you are dealing with a name translation requirement, a typo or just a mistake. All three abound! Chapter 5 seems to be particularly beset by these, which is unfortunate because it is the first real dive into TurboGears features. Eventually you start to get a feel for things and by the time you reach the end of the book you can spot the mistakes, which makes it a useful reference tool in conjunction with the official manual.
   
   On top of that there are a few things that are just not explained at all. You just have to absorb them by osmosis, but don't quite know why they are as they are.
   
   The overall style is problem oriented with a very fast intro, followed by a simple bookmarks web application, then a walk through of a real world application (The WhatWhat project issues/risks management tool). The latter was very useful. The second half of the book explores each of the copmponent technologies in more depth and is where you will spend most of your time after the first read through. If it hadn't had the errors I'd have given it 4 stars, as it is, 3 will have to do, a pity. Maybe a second printing will fix the typos etc.