TurboGears Newbie Advice

[John Poelstra]

Any recommended books or tutorials or other good ways to get started 
with TurboGears--beyond the tutorials at http://docs.turbogears.org/ ? 
The book by Mark Ramm, etc. gets really mixed reviews at Amazon.

Thanks,
John

[Toshio Kuratomi]

John Poelstra wrote:
>  Any recommended books or tutorials or other good ways to get started
>
>  with TurboGears--beyond the tutorials at http://docs.turbogears.org/ ? 
>  The book by Mark Ramm, etc. gets really mixed reviews at Amazon.
>   
The TurboGears book has both good points and bad points.  You won't be 
sorry you own it if you have it but it isn't the end-all-be-all either.

If you use sqlalchemy instead of sqlobject, then what you need for a 
model is *very* well documented at http://www.sqlalchemy.org/.  So 
despite the fact that sqlobject is somewhat easier to use, i'd highly 
recommend sqlalchemy for this reason alone.

For tutorials, I'm not sure what's out there... I started with tg-admin 
quickstart  and then adapting the project to see what worked and what 
didn't.  I liked having good reference material when I did that -- 
sqlalchemy.org, genshi.edgewall.org, cherrypy.org, and some turbogears.org.

-Toshio

[Lloyd Kvam]

The source code in the book is riddled with typos.  I don't know if the
downloads have been fixed.  The examples are useful.  There is very
little reference material.

I bought the book and have found it useful - to the extent I would buy
it again even knowing the problems.

The different component (cherrypy, sqlalchemy, etc.) websites generally
do a good job of documenting the details.  This book describes how the
pieces fit together.

It fails miserably as a reference.  A typical example: the expose
decorator is used to mark a method to be exposed as a URL.  The examples
show:
        @expose(template='myapp.templates.mytemp')
        def mymethod(self, **params):
        	...
However, if the template is determined at run time, you need to specify
that in the dictionary that is returned by the method.
        return dict(
                tg_template='myapp.templates.othertemp',
                ...

You'll figure out the the dictionary key is different from the expose
parameter name, but it would be nice if there were a few reference
summaries in the book to cover issues like that.

You will still be relying heavily on the different component web sites

On Thu, 2008-05-15 at 13:23 -0700, John Poelstra wrote:
>  Any recommended books or tutorials or other good ways to get started
>
>  with TurboGears--beyond the tutorials at http://docs.turbogears.org/ ? 
>  The book by Mark Ramm, etc. gets really mixed reviews at Amazon.
>  
>  Thanks,
>  John
>  
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-- 
Lloyd Kvam
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[Luke Macken]

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 01:23:06PM -0700, John Poelstra wrote:
>  Any recommended books or tutorials or other good ways to get started 
>
>  with TurboGears--beyond the tutorials at http://docs.turbogears.org/ ?  
>  The book by Mark Ramm, etc. gets really mixed reviews at Amazon. 
I personally found Mark's TG book to be a great read, even though it
contains many typos.  It'll give you a good understanding of how
TurboGears is put together, and the components used (kid, SQLObject,
CherryPy) in the book will be supported for a long time.

However, TurboGears 1.1 is coming out soon, which replaces a lot of
the default components: kid->genshi, SQLObject->SQLAlchemy,
TG Widgets->ToscaWidgets.  For someone wanting to learn TurboGears,
I highly recommend diving into the 1.1 stack (which can already used
in any 1.0 application already).

There are a couple of SQLAlchemy books that are supposed to hit the
shelves next month.  One by Mark Ramm and one of the SQLAlchemy
developers, and an O'Reilly one (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596516147/).

Good luck!

luke