Customer Reviews

Beginning Joomla! (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This book does a nice job to get you up and running with a Joomla!-website (chapters 1 to 3), and then in chapter 4 nicely points your way in getting your own content organized and in place, but then, when it comes to questions like "How do I put related but different articles together in one 'page'" it lets you down completely. The way you use menu's to lay out a page doesn't get real attention, instead you only get an overview of the different manager screens, no explanation of the coworking of menu and module manager.
I expected this to come in chapter 6, but then the author moves to things like creating new templates, using extensions and other things that are surely interesting to know, but of more intermediate to advanced level. The beginners level however seems to be somewhat unfinished. I really have looked to see if pages where missing in my copy somewhere in chapter 4 or 5, but they weren't.
This book could have been so much better if the more advanced chapters where left for a second volume and that space was used for more info about concepts and real world examples. The books promises to make you from novice to professional, but you really can't get there if the foundation is too weak.

First off, let me state that I'm a complete beginner when it comes to making websites. I have very limited experience with HTML/XHTML, and no experience with PHP, MySQL, javascript, modules, etc. But with this book I was able to have a complete up and running website in a matter of hours. The author does a very good job of holding your hand and walking you step by step through the entire process of setting up Joomla! on your web server and customizing the site to make it your own.

I've looked at some of the documentation online, but a lot of it assumes that the reader has a more than cursory knowledge of numerous online processes. But Rahmel assumes that you have a shaky foundation of websites and instructs you accordingly. The book is also valuable in that it explains the numerous ins and outs of Joomla! where other documents fall short. For example, one of the templates I downloaded didn't call up the breadcrumbs module and I had no idea how to insert it into the template. The online documentation didn't help much, but luckily this book explained the breadcrumbs module and how to insert it. For anyone who is a newb to website design, this is the perfect book to get you started.

I liked Joomla and really wanted to get under the hood. Not necessarily covered in oil but proficient enough to take any template and make a really professional web site from it. Now I don't mean to be a naysayer but I bought this book owing to the praiseworthy reviews. I've been hand coding websites for ten years and have even built my own CMS using PHP and MySQL so I'll give my opinion for the sake of those who are about to buy based on what I feel are misleading rave reviews.

First of all, Joomla is a very powerful CMS, so in fairness to the author it would be very difficult to write a book which warranted five stars given the complexity of what this CMS affords one. However, I do agree with, J. W. L. Smits "doctor dream", and should have paid more attention to that review. The book will get you underway competently but when it comes to implementing a template and customizing it for your particular purposes look elsewhere - this book will not be especially helpful. By and large, it is for the novice, it simply is not for the professional. Hopefully a second or third edition will address information organization more clearly especially with regard to the many permutations Joomla offers for navigation. Afterall if your navigation misleads, your audience leaves the page rapidly. I think the editor should have helped Mr. Rahmel more closely, it seems rushed and frought with omission as if it were trying to remain under a certain number of pages. Adding the 'to Professional' onto the title tagline is clearly the publishers effort at entrapping a greater audience - poor form.

I've read the thing cover to cover and it really needs an overhaul in terms of informational hierarchy and content layout. Specifically, what constitutes an article, why does it fall under a certain category and where and what section that in turn lies beneath and why and how do I link an article under a category within a section - the fundamental stuff, I could go on. In summary, buy it if you know nothing about CMS's, for a beginner its a four star read and you'll have a CMS website in no time. For the rest of us, get back online and google the forums and or buy Barrie North's book, 'Joomla, A users Guide'.

If you're an "expert," you won't need it. If you're a novice, you'll find it long on description and short on real-world application and context. If you're in between, you'll find it sorely lacking in the practical nook-and-cranny knowledge that would get you to the next level.

This book is unfortunately typical of open-source documentation. By the time you know enough to understand it, it's largely redundant.

Well, I pretty much had to learn Joomla from scratch within a few days. There is so much documentation online, but this book was well worth the $40 I spent on it. I bought it from a bookstore.

As a novice developer, I felt this book was written in easy to read, easy to understand, language. Not at all theoretical, and provides good practical examples with lots of diagrams and screen-shots.

This is one of the few technical books out there that I didn't get a headache from reading. I highly recommend it.

I was initially very pleased with this book, and with help from this book, I was able to get a basic Joomla website running in a day or so. However as other reviewers have noted it seems to be missing several chapters that should provide details and examples of how to use menus, modules and articles together to create a good Joomla website.

The author raves about the Leo outline editor but never shows how to actually implement the outline using the Joomla menus etc. The author touches on some advanced issues such as creating your own template or an extension, but does not explain how to use the templates or extensions that come with Joomla. For example he states that "The parameters for Mod_mainmenu can change everything from the menu style to the menu hierarchy" but provides no examples and then proceeds to list the more advanced options! At a minimum he should explain how modules position content as left, main, right etc. Also as an example of poor organization this topic is in "Extensions - Default Site Modules - Main Menu" rather than "Adding Menus to Point to Content".

Figuring out how to modify a template and use modules so that content is placed where you want it, is perhaps the hardest aspect of Joomla. I'm still struggling to understand what all the CSS styles are used for. The author provides a brief intro to CSS but it would be nice to have a list of the key Joomla CSS styles and where they are used, plus some real world examples of (say) changing a color scheme or widening a column.

I'm puzzled by the many glowing reviews for this book! It gets off to a good start but then wanders off to discuss editors, extensions, analytics etc. rather than providing a good foundation for building a solid Joomla website.

This book is a great way to get introduced to Joomla if, like me, you are only used to creating static content websites. With the help of this book I got a site up and running in a really short time and was mostly pleased with the results. If there is one flaw with this book it is that it covers too much and falls short on some of the finer points of content management. I searched forever through the book to find out how to achieve a couple of things that were relatively simple, but on teh whole this book is a great product and I highly recommend it.

It was very helpful for me. I'd been poking around in Joomla! for a while and needed more. The book helped explain a lot of stuff I didn't understand and I was up and running in no time.

I would have liked less space allocated to discussing other tools (like site layout tools and FTP clients). I also would have preferred that the chapter on extensions was moved up a bit - it would have made more sense before the chapter on creating your own templates. I cared more about different extensions that I did making my own template.

This is the first time I write a review on Amazon, but I really felt I had to, as a warning for potential buyers. If you managed to install Joomla on your own and have played with it even just a little, you do _not_ need this book. You will already know the vast majority of the contents.

I know some reviewers pointed this out, but after going through other reviews and the TOC, I figured there would still be things to learn. Well, I was unfortunately dead wrong.

I scanned through the book in 30mn: the first 200 pages revolve around installing Joomla, then you have quite a bit of list of administrator settings / actions with a short description of what they do (nothing more than what you would get through the built-in joomla help), no info on optimizing Joomla performance, no info on how Joomla internals work (if only for the curious folks), no that much information about security issues, etc... To be fair, you do have sections on how to organize your website, how to setup community building around your website, which could be useful to novice users, but not useful to people looking for technical information. Sometimes, the book also turns into a catalog of open source software you could use for a given job. I don't think that's relevant to the core topic, and would rather have had more Joomla related content.

For a technical book, this is also quite average: the progression in introducing new concepts, the structure... all could be better. Here's a concrete example, which to me says it all: there's not even a single graphic showing in one place what's a module, a component, a menu and so on in a rendered Joomla page. Sometimes, you have a screenshot with an arrow pointing at something. It really feels like the illustrations where an afterthought which is quite strange for a supposedly technical book.

To conclude, the subtitle "From novice to professional" is really misleading: I know it's a hyperbole and you can't expect anymore to become a real professional after reading a 300 pages book, but still, the subtitle should really be: "building your first website with joomla".

As a web graphic designer, I want to expand my skills into CMS systems. I thought this book would be a good start, but after reading it, I learned little more than how to install Joomla and basic interactions. The book is states it's for "Novice to Professional," but a more accurate description would be "a getting started guide".