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I received a free copy from Packt Publishing to review Practical Plone 3, the newest Plone book out there (for the moment, a couple coming up in the next few weeks). It took more time than I expected to get around to it, so I apologize to Packt for the delay. Here is the review, at last.

This is a book which is aimed at beginners, tough I dare say that the term beginner in this case is stretched a bit. That is because the book is divided in four parts and I think that the reader of parts one and two might not be the kind of reader that will ever get to parts three and four, because the skill levels required are so wide apart. I guess the idea was to cover the basics and then keep at hand the required knowledge for people who might want to learn more, but I’m not sure it works.

Even so, the material in the book does cover beginner and intermediate levels, which fits nicely with the advanced profile of Packt’s other Plone 3 book, Professional Plone Development, by Martin Aspeli. In those two books, we have close to 1,000 pages of Plone 3 knowledge combined. This is really a very good thing for the Plone community.

Speaking of community, the book is a real community effort, as 13 different persons wrote at least one chapter. I think both the authors and editors did a good job at making the text flow without abrupt style changes, so overall I think this idea worked pretty well.

As for the content of the book, I find the authors did a good job too. The book is well written and covers the material aptly. In fact, I feel the parts where the reader is more likely to get lost or find some difficulty understanding the concepts, are more the result of Plone’s shortcomings than of the author’s skills.

Part one is a short introduction to Plone, including installation and a tour full of screen shots that show each part of the user interface. It’s a good introduction for someone who has never been near Plone before.

Part two focuses on what you can do with Plone out of the box. Every feature of Plone 3 is described and explained with heavy use of screen shots. The features are covered pretty thoroughly and the explanations are well written. The only chapter where I think the reader may have problems is the one on workflows. That’s not because it’s badly written, but because for the first time in the book, the reader is forced to abandon the nice confines of the Plone UI and use the Zope Management Interface directly for creating a workflow. As I commented before, this is really a Plone shortcoming, since there is no mechanism to create workflows from its UI. This made Matt Bowen’s task a lot harder and even though he explains it well, I feel a beginner will not get it.

Part three abandons the comfortable beginner pace and lets the reader dive into more advanced topics. The reader is shown how to create repeatable deployments, install add-on products, build forms, create simple content types, customize Plone and change its look and feel. In the preface, the authors state that no programming skills are expected, but the chapters about customizing Plone and changing the look and feel really go beyond that promise. I see no way that the audience described in the preface will be able to successfully get through these chapters without putting a lot of time and effort on them, to say the least.

Again, the problem is not the writing. Veda Williams makes a valiant effort, but there’s no way around the truth: Plone’s theming story is just awful. There are two very different ways of working with themes and Plone 3 is built in such a way that you need to learn both to do this. In addition to the ideas behind old style skins, which most readers will understand easily, the Plone 3 would-be themer has to learn about concepts which come from Zope 3 and are not that easy to grasp (for example views, layers, resources, viewlets, viewlet managers and more). Simply put, it’s a lot harder to theme a site than to do anything else explained in this book. I’m not going into much detail here because this is not the subject of this post, but I will silently show you this table:

By the way, Veda Williams is working on a new book about Plone theming that will explain all this in much more detail and even show a way around it. Since her book is focused on this subject, I’m pretty sure it will find the right audience. It’s just around the corner, coming in May.

Going back to the subject at hand, part four of the book explains some advanced tasks, like deploying a site, using a caching proxy to speed it up and even connecting Plone to an LDAP/Active Directory server. The chapter on caching alone makes this part useful enough.

Overall, I think that if Plone is used at your workplace this book will be nice to have around. You will find this book most valuable if you are a developer who has never used Plone and your boss came to you and told you to install Plone or assigned you a Plone site to maintain. If you want an introduction to Plone and are considering this book, review the table of contents carefully and decide if you are likely to go into the materials in parts two and three before buying, since at US $49.99 the book is not cheap. Likewise, if you want to go into Plone development but find Martin Aspeli’s book too hard to follow, Practical Plone 3 could help you get there, but you might not find the first part that much useful.