Preface

Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears is designed to help you learn to develop web applications faster by using the full set of features included in TurboGears.

To that end, we've divided this book up into several parts: First we'll get an overview of TurboGears and how everything fits together. Then we'll dive right in and create a simple application, and get an overview of how TurboGears works. Then we'll jump into a real world project management application that takes advantage of many of TurboGears's more advanced features. These first three sections are designed to introduce the commonly used features of all the main TurboGears components, to provide you with some insight into the TurboGears philosophy, and to help you build web applications faster. When you're done with the first three sections, you ought to be able to use TurboGears to write reasonably complex applications.

When you're ready to take it up a notch, we also have several more sections that go in depth on each of the various technologies that TurboGears uses to make your life easier.

We'll delve more deeply into MochiKit, SQLObject, Kid, and CherryPy. We'll also explore the TurboGears specific pieces, widgets, and decorators in much greater depth. We'll talk about scaling and performance. We'll show you more advanced patterns, and generally help you take your TurboGears programming ability to the next level.

Along the way you may want to download example code, ask questions, or get more information about a particular subject. We've created www.turbogearsbook.com so that there is a living and changing repository for all kinds of extra stuff that we couldn't fit in the book, or which is simply too new to have been included here.

This book assumes you have a basic understanding of web technologies like XHTML, CSS, and Javascript along with an understanding of Python, and the basics of Relational Databases. We've tried not to assume too much, and we intentionally picked reviewers who were new to one or more of these areas in an attempt to make the learning curve as smooth as possible. But if you are new to any of these technologies, we've got some articles, links, and book recommendations on our website.

The goal for TurboGears, and for this book, is to make easy things easy, and hard things possible. After the first couple sections you should feel comfortable making basic database driven sites, and after the next few sections you'll have the tools you need to create complex Ajax enabled sites with dynamic user interfaces.