I’ve been asked by PACKT publishing to review a new book  Grok 1.0 Web Development.

Grok? Who or what is Grok?

“Grok is a web application framework for Python developers. It is aimed at both beginners and very experienced web developers. Grok  has an emphasis on agile development. Grok is easy and powerful.”

Grok 1.0 Web Development is written by Carlos de la Guardia and has been first published in Feb 2010.

The book is intended for developers more or less familiar with the concepts of web applications who want to write their applications using the Python programming language. No familiarity with Zope is assumed from the start. The approach is practical, focusing on getting working code right from the beginning.

What you will learn from this book

• Basic concepts of the Zope Component Architecture
• Use Zope Page Templates to produce HTML pages
• Design efficient applications using models and views
• Use Grok’s automatic form generation mechanisms
• Add selectable themes or skins to your applications
• Index content from the models you defined and learn how to search this content by querying the catalog, including full text search
• Understand how the Zope Object Database works and how simple and useful it is
• Easily connect to other relational databases using SQLAlchemy
• Create extensions to your applications
• Understand the various options to deploy your Grok application, and use buildout—a Python-based build system for deploying applications—to create a repeatable deployment

The author does a great job explaining a very, very complex software system.  A lot of the Zope specific details were left out as this was a book on Grok, but when the detail was required, it was very simple to digest and understand.

As always, there is a free chapter available for your reading pleasure. Chapter No 5 : Forms. You can also order the book following this link.