Pylons Progress

I was hoping to plough through the The Definitive Guide to Pylons ("The Pylons Book"), but I only made it to chapter seven since last Saturday. Most of that was achieved in the last two days, so it was mostly down my not keeping up the pace. Chapters five and six covered Mako and FormEncode respectively. I have not used FormEncode at all and Mako only slightly more than that, which slowed me down too. Chapter seven was faster because I have a little more experience with SQLAlchemy, but I still learned a few new things. The book has introduced enough material to start writing a simple application so naturally chapter eight does just that.

I understand why I suffered information overload while trying to learn Pylons and develop an application at the same time, even though that is my usual learning style. Pylons is a loosely couple framework that ties unrelated modules together. Mako, FormEncode, and SQLAlchemy are completely separate projects, each with its own documentation and tutorials. The shorter Pylons tutorials naturally assume some familiarity with the modules, which meant that I spent much time digging through their documentation, without a clear understanding of what was important from a Pylons perspective. This is where The Pylons Book is proving really helpful.

Pylons appeals to me because it doesn't reinvent modules unnecessarily but that also made it harder to learn in my usual way.