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Friday, December 19, 2008

Into Pylons I go...

So I've never really considered myself a web developer. Rather, I believe I'm a systems/administration/platforms guy that can slap a text-only HTML page up if I bump into a problem that a command line client can't solve. I build the classic "engineer" web site.

A few weeks back I started a project which requires a lot of heavy web UI work. Hopefully, it's able to pay the bills at some point.

Aside from having to learn CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and enough graphics to get by, I've also had to dive into the world of web frameworks. I looked at what I consider the "big three" up front - Django, TurboGears, and RoR.

Then I found Pylons. More importantly, I found http://www.pylonsbook.com. This has got to be one of the most complete end-to-end web development books I've seen thus far. Sure, it covers templating and routes and whatnot, but it also dives into things such as S3, and non-RDBMS based data models. It seems to answer a lot of edge case questions that other resources have brushed over. A big thanks to Mr. Gardner and the community for putting this one together. I'll be picking up a hard copy.

I think I might be a Pylons guy now.