Andrea, First post on web2py, but your circumstances are close enough to mine to jump in here.
Background: Father was a COBOL developer, learned Tandy TRS basic in elementary school and pascal in high school, no code through grad school except some matlab fiddling. Taught myself enough Wordpress to set up sites for business and personal. Found a partner in crime to start developing saas for a specific niche of the professional audio market. He's a much more savvy coder than I, but stuff like OWASP turns my crank and together we are navigating this water. The present: We started off looking at Google app engine, and then they made it really expensive for what we want to do. Now we are picking a python framework and will start on vps and move to Heroku/ AES/dotcloud/etc when traffic justifies We don't want to be amazing coders, we see programming as a means to solve problems for other people in specific niches we know well, all while making money for our enterprise. That leans us strongly towards web2py with postgres. Helpful resources: Learn using Wordpress, it has beyond extensive documentation, and its how I became aware of sql injection, xss, css, html, vps administration, cdn's memcached, etc. It taught me the moving pieces of a dynamic website. Even its flaws are useful. It taught me to stay far away from php as a novice. It also lead me to see the need for structure like mvc. Also, I recommend: http://books.google.com/books/about/Using_Google_App_Engine.html?id=_... Which, while targeted at gae, is a good intro to all web basics, and it was written for MBAs, not cs students. I have found it useful cliffs notes. -Phil PS Marco, ill be first in line to buy your book, and/or be one of your beta readers. On Dec 2, 10:17 pm, Andrea Bravi <andrea.br...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > first of all, thank you for the really nice job done with web2py: as soon > as I downloaded it, I really liked how easy it is to use the admin > interface and play with it! > > That being said, I would like to kindly ask you some advices regarding how > to learn using web2py. I have a background in Python and database > design/programming, however I don't know anything about web applications (I > am a biomedical engineer). I was trying to read the official web2py book, > however from Chapter 4 I realized that I could understand and reproduce the > examples, but I was definitely not capable to abstract and learn how to use > the entire API. It seems to me that the material is targeting an audience > that already knows how to create web applications, and that only needs to > learn a new "vocabulary". Now, is there some book/slides/course/anything > that you would suggest me to start with? I could buy a book like Python 3 > Web Development Beginner's Guide (assuming that's what I need) and start > from there, however I would like something that targets directly web2py. > > I hope the question is clear enough! Let me know if you need other details. > > Thank you for your help, > > Andrea