Comments about O'Reilly Media Using Google App Engine:

I found the book a good base to teach appengine

Comments about O'Reilly Media Using Google App Engine:

It`s a course in a book, as it explains in the Preface. It's very didactic. Explains a little about css/html, python, and ajax, but only for understand the application that is developing along the book. The code of GAE itself is very useful, but it's true that it's outdated. It would be interesting a web page where the code was update, and the typos corrected.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Using Google App Engine:

The author says "this book assumes no knowledge of programming or web technologies and is written in a way that is understandable to non programmers... it starts from the beginning and covers the necessary prerequisite technologies..." while all this may be true and the background data on the http protocol and html/css are great. The code still has errors. The two examples using the webapp frame work and templates don't work with the code shown. From my research it appears that the book was taken from a series of lecturs the author did when google app engine was first released in 2008. The book was released in may of 2009 and it appears that google has made some changes in the way the appengine works with templates. However, the author makes no mention of these changes offers no errata nor any way to contact him from the publishers site or his own. Too bad I did not know that before I blew [$]

Comments about O'Reilly Media Using Google App Engine:

Using Google App Engine a review by Lee McKusick 7-30-2009

Last year, Google Apps as I understood it was a free office and communications suite with a spreadsheet, blog, photo storage and word processor. The Apps were available online with free file storage and a file sharing provision.

Now Google Apps has added a free (for limited use) website construction toolkit. The toolkit is offered in Python with a parallel toolkit in Java. This toolkit can be downloaded and used on a personal computer. An application developed on a personal computer can be uploaded and run on Google's servers. Quite a bit of traffic and data is allowed under the "free" service.

Note that the Google AppEngine is a rather extraordinary business proposition. For moderate amounts of web traffic, Google is allowing you to create a website, run the website in their cloud of servers and store data on their servers for free. All the free websites appear as yourname.appspot.com.

I have not figured out the strategic and social considerations of the Google free web site offer. The posted demo websites are pretty impressive.

So skipping that issue, back to the book review:

The main URL for accessing the Google Web Apps toolkit is:

http://code.google.com/appengine/

Using Google App Engine is an introduction and tutorial with the development of an example program.

The audience being addressed is both first time web site builders and persons with considerable web experience.

The Google software package is mainly conventional Python. Additional Python library code with specific functions is supplied by Google. The Google supplied libraries provide the connections needed for your app to run on Google's servers.

Chapter by chapter Using Google App Engine explains how Google has implemented each of the usual website components. The book explains how a browser to server transaction works, how Google provides a kind of data store, how you attach a name to your web application, and how you do a testing and a production version of your software.

The explanations strike me as very careful, tested writing. The explanations reveal the system in layers, show where the details lie that may be revisited later, and model the simplicity and clarity of programs written in Python.

Google Apps does not have testing in the sense used by Rails developers. Instead of testing, Google Apps provides the user with a local development environment, then after uploading to the Google cloud, the user can operate a production and a separate testing version of her App

This review also published in the PenLug.org book reviews.