Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Google App Engine:

Is there a downloadable example tarball or zip file somewhere?

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Google App Engine:

GAE is a platform and set of services for building web applications.
GAE scales your web application automatically as long as you work within their set of restrictions such as using a non relational datastore.

Although the online GAE doc has great coverage and documentation, I wanted something which could provide a little more depth. Looking up things as you need them in the GAE docs doesn't give you a high level global understanding of what's possible and how to do it.

I am left feeling confident coding for GAE after reading this book. The author has a great understanding of GAE and does a great job of explaining everything clearly. I was never bored when reading this book and the examples were great dealing with game avatars.

After reading this book you will be ready to take on a GAE project to solidify the knowledge you learnt. You will have a great understanding of GAE runtime, datastore, index design, datastore transactions, memcache, queues, scheduled tasks, webapp module, django on GAE, remote API, bulk data operations, incoming/outgoing email, incoming/outgoing XMPP and more.

You will also understand exactly what will never be possible on this platform, and what will one day be possible.

This book is a quick read, it is 333 pages not including the index, and if you are only interested in Python you will be skipping over about 1/3 of the book. I would have preferred if the book only focused on Python and didn't even mention Java. I would have preferred the book to be split into 2; a python version and a Java version.

In the one and a half years since the book was released, and since GAE was released April 7, 2008, there are already several additions to GAE, but everything mentioned in the book is still sound. The book will give you enough of a foundation of Google App Engine to continue on.
I hope future editions will include coverage on OAuth, Prospective Search, DoS Protection, the django nonrel project, and updated content throughout

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Google App Engine:

I've run through the code in the book twice now with a fine tooth comb... It's highlighted and annotated like a freight train with graffiti; but it won't run!

GAE being a new "thing", I would expect the book to be a little more granular about running the code. Not just, "make this change here, and that change there, and wahlah."

I'm disappointed.

Robert

ps: (Super Guru's, hold your counter comments on my ignorance... This book is for people like me, GAE newbs, and this book doesn't do it A-Z)

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Google App Engine:

If you're like me, when Google announced free hosting on their App Engine platform, you couldn't wait to start tinkering with the new bit of goodness that Google was giving to the world...

But then I started reading the docs. Hmm. I know a bit about relational databases. Hmm how do I do a join?

What the heck are entities and entity groups and all this new terminology. For some reason I just couldn't grock the datastore.

But then i read this book. :)

It covers both Python (primarily) and the Java version of Google app engine.

There are 4 chapters on the datastore, so you'll get a very thorough explanation of what it can and can't do. The performance impacts of implementation details etc.

There's also chapters which cover the fairly recently added task queues, XMPP, mail, and scheduled task features. All covered as you would expect from the best of the OReilly books.

So my advice, If you've read the online docs and you're having trouble wrapping your head around GAE, definitely buy it.

If you grocked the free online docs, you may still get a reasonable amount of new knowledge from this book, as there's a lot of implementation details explained, which I didn't find in the online docs last time I read through them.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming Google App Engine:

Many concepts for programming in GAE are transferrable from other experiences and the book does a great job of tackling these.

Where the book becomes absolutely essential though is in the detailed explanation of the datastore. I suspect most folks will find the treatment here enlightening and helpful to avoid many pitfalls. I haven't even finished it yet and it has already significantly altered the models I was planning to implement.

This is sweet.