The problem with Python 3 Web Development Beginner’s Guide, by Michel Anders, is one of expectations (disclaimer: I received a free eBook from Packt for review). Let’s start with the title… First we have Python 3 Web Development. This immediately sets the wrong expectations because:

1. There’s almost as much jQuery & Javascript as there is Python.
2. Most of the Python code is not Python 3 specific, and the code that is could easily be translate to Python 2.
3. Much of the Python code either uses CherryPy or is for generating HTML. This is not immediately obvious, but becomes apparent in Chapter 3 (which is available as a free PDF download: Chapter 3 – Tasklist I Persistence).

Second, this book is also supposed to be a Beginner’s Guide, but that is definitely not the case. To really grasp what’s going on, you need to already know the basics of HTML, jQuery interaction, and how HTTP works. Chapter 1 is an excellent introduction to HTTP and web application development, but the book as a whole is not beginner material. I think that anything that uses Python metaclasses automatically becomes at least intermediate level, if not expert, and the main thrust of Chapter 7 is refactoring all your straightforward database code to use complicated metaclasses.

However, if you mentally rewrite the title to be “Web Framework Development from scratch using CherryPy and jQuery”, then you’ve got the right idea. The book steps you through web app development with CherryPy, database models with sqlite3, and plenty of HTML and jQuery for interface generation and interaction. While creating example applications, you slowly build up a re-usable framework. It’s an interesting approach, but unfortunately it gets muddied up with inline HTML rendering. I never thought a language as simple and elegant as Python could be reduced to the ugliness of common PHP, but generating HTML with string interpolation inside the same functions that are accessing the database gets pretty close. I kept expecting the author to introduce template rendering, which is a major part of most modern web development frameworks, but it never happened, despite the plethora of excellent Python templating libraries.

While reading this book, I often had the recurring thought “I’m so glad I use Django“. If your aim is rapid application development, this is not the book for you. However, if you’re interested in creating your own web development framework, or would at least like to understand how a framework like Django could be created, then buy a copy Python 3 Web Development.