LearningJourney: A Zope 3 tutorial

Last year, in December, I held a 3 day Zope 3 training for about 10 Zope 2 and Python programmers. For this training I had prepared a 50 pages booklet with some tutorials and reference information (most of it written by me especially for this occasion). The feedback was pretty positive, but only time will tell if I was succesful or not with my training.

I have published the training material on Google Code in a project called z3ergo. My intention is to publish there more packages and tutorials, as they come. The beef of the tutorial was a simple but complete application called LearningJourney. My initial intention was to have an application where students could enter a log of the things that they learn, but it could be thought as a simple blog system as well. This is a full Zope 3 tutorial application, complete with a site, skin and registration process. I hope somebody can find it useful. The leaflet is published there in two languages (English and Romanian), in pdf format. You can find the source code for the docs in the LearningJourney docs folder.

The materials cover a lot of the Zope 3 landscape, as this training was for knowledgeable Zope 2/Plone programmers who were evaluating Zope 3 and also had access to other Zope 3 docs, such as Philipp's Zope 3 book. Keep this in mind when going through the docs and wonder why they're so slim.

The training itself was pretty non-formal. I've used the booklet and the sourcecode to guide them through what a Zope 3 application means. There were a lot of questions (practically, the training flow was more question based, with just a few interventions from me to guide it to a different direction), but many things that were covered mostly at surface. We didn't have any practical exercises, although I wish I was able to have them, it might have helped the students feel a little bit less lost. A more structured approach could have helped as well, who knows. It was both tiring and fun and I got to meet lots of cool people, with which I will hopefull colaborate in the future.

If there's an interest in getting more out of these docs, or you might need me as a Zope 3 trainer, feel free to contact me using this site's contact form.

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