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Python 3 Web Development Beginner's Guide ReviewPackt Publishing asked me to review "Python 3 Web Development Beginner's Guide" ([...]). I'll have to admit, it's a bit of an odd duck. A better (albeit overly verbose) title might have been "An Introduction to Rich Internet Application Development Using jQuery UI, a Very Modern Version of Python, a Relatively Old Python Web Application Framework Named CherryPy, and an Ancient Version of HTML Written by a Guy Who Uses Windows".The first tipoff that this book was a bit strange was that the author uses Windows and some combination of Firefox and IE. It seems like most web developers use OS X (or occasionally Linux), and they prefer Chrome over IE.
The next tipoff was the use of jQuery UI. jQuery UI is a very modern technology which is often used to build rich internet applications. RIAs really aren't the sort of thing that I would expect to see in a book for beginners. What happened to the old days when beginning web applications focused on the server dynamically generating HTML? If I took the time to count the number of lines of code, I wouldn't be surprised if this book had more JavaScript than Python.
The title of this book mentions Python 3, but if you search for "Python 3" in the book, there are extremely few mentions of it. This book really isn't about Python 3 per se (as compared to Python 2); it has a lot more to do with jQuery UI.
Whereas Python 3 and jQuery UI are very modern technologies, standing in contrast is the book's use of HTML 4 and CherryPy. HTML 4 is an *ancient* version of HTML. I would expect anyone using jQuery UI to use either XHTML or HTML5. At the very least, I would have expected one of the transitional DTDs. Similarly, he uses CherryPy. Although I agree that CherryPy is solid code, it's also fairly old. It predates any of the modern Python frameworks.
This book claims to teach web development "without having to learn another web framework" [p. 1]. That's simply not true. It makes heavy use of CherryPy. The home page for CherryPy ([...]) calls it an "HTTP framework" and says that it has "everything you would expect from a decent web framework." It's not as full-featured as, say, Django, but parts in the example code such as "@cherrypy.expose" [p. 36] are certainly framework features. In fact, "@cherrypy.expose" is part of CherryPy's object publishing system, which it uses as a replacement for regex-based URL routing.
Another thing that's a bit strange about this book is that the author doesn't use a client-side or a server-side templating language. In JavaScript, he tends to use string concatenation, which is weird because there is a templating pluging for jQuery. On the server, he embeds HTML directly in the Python code, which is pretty ugly (as he mentions on p. 229).
Furthermore, the code is extremely sloppy. The code does not follow Python's style guide concerning whitespace (PEP-8) (see for example p. 145) even though PEP-8 is extremely standard in the Python community. Nor is it even self consistent. I don't know of anyone who puts a space before the colon in expressions such as "if not isinstance(name,str) :" [p. 146]. The indentation in the JavaScript is not only non-standard and inconsistent, it's occasionally completely wrong [p. 118] (i.e. the indentation disagrees with the braces).
Aside from bad style, I'm a little concerned about various coding practices. For instance, the JavaScript at the bottom of p. 40 has variables that don't use var. This means they're effectively global. This is extremely bad practice. Fortunately, he does use var in other places in the book.
On the subject of security, there are several standard security vulnerabilities that web applications must protect against: XSS (cross-site scripting vulnerabilities), SQL injection attacks, XSRF (cross-site request forgeries), and session fixation (or session hijacking) attacks. Every book on web development should cover these.
The book mentions XSS, but I fear it's approach may not be thorough enough. It does not mention the term "SQL injection" attack, but the ORM shown in the book does look to be somewhat safe. It mentions XSRF, but says that it's out of scope. It doesn't mention "session fixation" or "session hijacking". In general, I don't think the book is good enough about "escaping things" properly. For instance, on p. 293 the author creates a URL in JavaScript using values from a form, but he doesn't take care to URL encode the parameters.
Despite all of the above, I can say this about the book. The author does a good job explaining the web to beginners. Modern web applications are fairly complicated beasts. There's the client, the web server, and the database server, and they each require their own syntaxes. The author does a decent job explaining what runs where. It can be difficult for an expert web developer, such as myself, to remember that newbies might not know all these things.
In summary, will this book help you become a competent, professional web developer? Absolutely not. Is it as well written as, say, "Agile Web Development with Rails" ([...]). No. However, might it be a good way for a beginner to dip his toes in web development with Python and jQuery UI? Maybe.
(Disclaimers: Packt gave me a free electronic copy of this book in trade for my review. I have not read the whole thing. I did read the first 50 pages and skimmed various key sections.)Python 3 Web Development Beginner's Guide OverviewPart of Packt's Beginner's Guide Series, this book follows a sample application, with lots of screenshots, to help you get to grips with the techniques as quickly as possible. Moderately experienced Python programmers who want to learn how to create fairly complex, database-driven, cross browser compatible web apps that are maintainable and look good will find this book of most use. All key technologies except for Python 3 are explained in detail.
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