Earlier this year, just before PyCon, I talked to O’Reilly about doing a Pyramid video course in their commercial training catalog. It’s now in “early access”, titled “Web Applications with Python and the Pyramid Framework“.
What an effort it turned out to be. I’m certainly grateful that it has wrapped up, but I’m also glad I did it. I put a serious amount of work (months) into writing, re-writing, and re-re-rewriting the narrative and the examples. Thanks go out to Chris and Tres for steering me throughout on best practices, to include the admonition that chasing best practices is a fool’s errand.
Several items of reflections:
- I resisted the urge to go off the beaten path. It’s routes, Jinja2, and SQLAlchemy. I originally had “traversal in SQL” in the proposal. I chopped it out, despite my ongoing attempt at “pyramid_sqltraversal” (on GitHub.)
- I put more emphasis than I expected on the JSON section and frontend web applications.
- I also put more into extensibility (aka “framework framework”) than I had planned. I’m not that good at that story, so perhaps that’s why… I finally had a reason to learn it. And damn, Pyramid’s awesome at that.
- Ditto for authentication and authorization combined with SQLAlchemy. I now know a lot more about how to do that, and it’s a great story. As an aside, root/route factories (and thus having a context) should be the way we teach people to start.
- Of course it featured PyCharm. I couldn’t have known that, as I wrapped up, I’d be talking to JetBrains about joining the PyCharm team.
- I got pretty good at Camtasia, geezus.
- Python’s packaging story is such a bear to explain to novices.
So six hours of (unedited) video later, it’s on the way out the door. Pyramid is so unique and so powerful…hope this series helps some mortals who are trying to get started.
