Books and Tutorials

by T. Kim Nguyen — last modified Jul 09, 2010 11:01 AM

Books and tutorials on Plone, Zope, and Python we recommend

Training Manuals

You can find training and user manuals written at UW Oshkosh at the following:

Books

The book "Plone Content Management Essentials" is one we recommend for general users of Plone sites: people who need to be able to add and edit pages on their Plone site. This book covers Plone up to and including version 2.5. For Plone 3 users, most of the book material still applies, and there is a free Plone 3 user manual available online.

For developers and web designers working with Plone up to and including version 2.5, we recommend the book "The Definitive Guide to Plone", although it is no longer being updated. It is also available online for free.

For developers and web graphic designers working with Plone 3, we recommend the book "Professional Plone Development" by Martin Aspeli, who is a major contributor to Plone.

Python

We recommend the following books on Python:

In general we like O'Reilly technical books. They also have an excellent online reading subscription service called Safari.

Tutorials and User Guides

The "Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python" tutorial is good for learning about various Python best practices and conventions. It is a good place to start if you want to familiarize yourself with the various nuances of the Python programming language.

The Plone Community Managed Developers Manual is a great source of information and provides examples and an in-depth overview of Plone, the Zope Component Architecture, the ZODB, among other things.

Zope.org provides great documentation on Zope include wikis, Zope Page Template resources, and API resources.

Other books and tutorials are described at the plone.org site's documentation section at http://plone.org/documentation

UW Oshkosh Training

The IT Training staff at UW Oshkosh provide training to the campus, for programmers, web designers ("skinners"), and users. Please see our Training page for more details.

Other Plone and Python Training

We recommend Joel Burton's Plone Bootcamps. They are 3-5 day workshops held mostly in various US cities (primarily San Francisco) as well as internationally on occasion (and usually at every Plone Symposium and Plone Conference). They cover topics such as theming and development. Joel Burton is an excellent and entertaining instructor, as well as being a past president of the Plone Foundation and a consultant.

For Python training, we recommend Chris Calloway's PyCamps. Chris is a fixture on the PyCon and Plone circuit. He is based at UNC.