1. Goals of this book

The main target audience for this book are developers that would like to develop on the Zope 3 framework itself; these are referred to as Zope developers in this book. But also Python program- mers will find many of the chapters interesting, since they introduce concepts that could be used in other Python applications as well. Python programmers could also use this book as an introduc- tion to Zope.

In general the chapters have been arranged in a way so that the Zope 3 structure itself could be easily understood. The book starts out by getting you setup, so that you can evaluate and develop with Zope 3. The second part of the book consists of chapters that are meant as introductions to various important concepts of Zope 3. If you are a hands-on developer like me, you might want to skip this part until you have done some development. The third and fourth part are the heart of the book, since a new content component with many features is developed over a course of 12 chapters.

Once you understand how to develop content components, part five has a set of chapters that introduce other components that might be important for your projects. The fifth part is intended for people that wish to use Zope technologies outside of Zope 3. The emphasis on testing is one of the most important philosophical transitions the Zope 3 development team has undergone. Thus the last chapter is dedicated to various ways to write tests.

Last but not least this book should encourage you to start helping us to develop Zope 3. This could be in the form of enhancing the Zope 3 core itself or by developing third party products, reaching from new content objects to entire applications, such as an e-commerce system. This book covers all the modules and packages required for you to start developing.