Nice discounts on open source titles at Packt

Packt has an offer on open source books, both in print and as e-book, that might interest you. Check out their July offering, there certainly are some interesting titles available, including a few on Python and web development.

Packt Python Book Idea Generator

Packt Publishing invites current and future readers to send in suggestions for subjects to cover in books on Python.

What Python subject do you want authors to write about?

I think this is a pretty neat idea. As a writer myself I choose subjects that interest me most and if a publisher thinks there is a market for it, the game is on. But I have many Python related interests and that probably goes for other authors as well, so if people had a way to show what they would like to see covered in a Python book, the publisher and authors could pick up a subject that would certainly please future readers. That's a classic win-win situation. The people at Packt now offer a such platform so if you have a (Python related) subject you would love to see a book about, check out this poll.

Python 3 Web Development Beginner's Guide, published!

Work on my new book, Python 3 Web Development Beginner's Guide, is done and both the e-book version and the print version are now available.

Python 3 Web Development Beginner's Guide is available now. Both the e-book version and the print version are now available on the publishers website as well as on the websites of the major on-line book stores.

Writing the book was hard work, but the attention and skills of the people at Packt Publishing and the reviewers of the book were a great help. Kudos to them!

Python 3 Web Development, beginners guide, the RAW version

My new book is available in a RAW version

The people at Packt Publishing decided to put my new book on their website in its RAW version, meaning you can get early access to it and at a discounted price as well.
The coming weeks I'll be working hard together with the editorial team at Packt to get the book ready for its final version. The book is a beginners guide on developing web applications in Python with a bit of help of Javascript and jQuery on the client side. And although we take small steps, we do take a lot of them and end with a quite elaborate framework that will help you develop quite sophisticated web applications with suprisingly little effort.

Python Geospatial Development, full review

Erik Westra did an excellent job here: delivering a book that is both comprehensive and easy to read. Of course you already need to know a bit of Python to start, but all topics are explained very well and the book is very hands-on and task oriented.

The integration of Google maps in almost everything from telephone directories to pizza ordering services and on-line news services shows that there is a huge appeal to providing relevant geographical information in all sorts of contexts. But where do you start if you want to develop such functionality in Python? This book is certainly an excellent starting point.

Erik covers basically any subject from necessary geometrical concepts like units, datums and projections, just to get you started, to where to get the needed Python libraries and more importantly where to source good basic data like maps, positions of cities, shapes of countries and shorelines, etc, preferably from free sources. As geographical information used to be hard to get and often expensive, this attention to data sources is a very valuable part of the book. I particularly liked his extensive coverage of the collaborative openstreetmap project, an extensive source of geographical data collected by a host of people around the world.

With these resources at hand the next steps are directed to manipulating geospatial data and generating all sorts of maps. The storage of data in databases with specific geospatial extensions to handle large datasets is covered in depth with specific examples for PostGIS, MySQL ans Sqlite. Also the rendering of maps is explained in a detailed manner focusing on the Mapnik library. The final part of the book is dedicated to developing a web application to work interactively with map data. As performance is a key issue when working with large maps, even the implementation of a caching tile server (a server that generates small parts of a map on demand as you browse and zoom over the map) is implemented and explained in detail.

All in all a near perfect book for everybody who wants to start developing map based applications. Its solid coverage, excellent reference material and detailed explanations certainly make it a five out five for me.

Python Geospatial Development

Every once in a while a book appears that immediately captures your attention. Python Geospatial Development by Erik Westra is such a book and the coming time I am sure I'll have an enjoyable time reading it. I'll post a full review when I am finished.

Done: Check this article.