Midwest Book Review said
Advanced programming collections will relish Rick Copeland's ESSENTIAL SQLALCHEMY, a powerful survey for Python developers who need to access relational databases. From customizing routines and creating objects to building a mapper and providing an active record pattern, this survey of SQLAlchemy will delight patrons of advanced developer guides.
Charles Anderson said
Essential SQLAlchemy by Rick Copeland is a great book describing how to use SQLAlchemy to connect Python programs to databases. In fact, at the moment (mid-summer 2008), it is the book, since there are no other books on the subject, yet. Athough I am not (yet) a SQLAlchemy user, this book seems to cover all of the core topics in SQLAlchemy. The text includes many straightforward examples of how to use various facilities in SQLAlchemy and how to map various database programming problems into Python code via SQLAlchemy. Copeland also provides a whirlwind tour of some extensions to SQLAlchemy.
To be honest, the first chapter (the proverbial introduction) almost turned me off. The author starts out slowly enough, but then he starts touching on a huge number details, which were glazing my eyes over. However, the second chapter (getting started) started back at ground zero and stepped through everything in a nice clear fashion, and the rest of the book continued in that vein. He covers all the topics you would expect in a database programming book: queries, updates, joins, the built-in types, and how to hook in to provide support for your own types.
Something I didn't realize about SQLAlchemy coming into this is that SQLAlchemy is both an ORM (what I expected) as well as a high-level, database-independent API. Which is to say, you can just access the database as tables, columns and rows rather than as classes, attributes, and object instances. Although I'd personally prefer to use the ORM, I can imagine cases where it might not be the right tool for the job, and it's good to have a choice.
I was also surprised to see the ORM supports two styles of object-relational access: the data mapper pattern (which I had seen in Django and Hibernate) and the active record (used in Ruby). The author does a good job of explaining both of these and how to use them. He even devotes a whole chapter to Exlir, which is an extension that implements the active record pattern.
In conclusion, Essential SQLAlchemy provides a thorough presentation of the SQLAlchemy tool for interfacing Python code to SQL databases. The author covers a number of different methods in which SQLAlchemy can be used to access databases from Python, and he provides plenty of details of the various APIs available to the programmer.
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