Building Websites with XOOPS : A step-by-step tutorial: Get your XOOPS website up fast using this easy-to-follow guide [Paperback]

Steve Atwal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 24, 2006

XOOPS is a popular PHP CMS whose object-oriented approach makes creating dynamic and modular websites simple. This book is an easy-to-read, introductory guide to XOOPS, providing many practical examples, and is a rapid first step to mastering this powerful tool. This book is suitable for web developers, designers, webmasters, and marketing professionals who want develop a fully featured web presence in a simple and straightforward process using XOOPS. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT confident individual will be able to use the book to produce an impressive web site.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Steve Atwal

Steve Atwal was born in India. He immigrated to Rochester, Kent, England, where his British education and cultural metamorphosis began. His passion in secondary school and college was mathematics. However, while in college in the late 1970s his thoughts turned to computers when he had his first taste of programming with BASIC and Fortran on the college mainframe.

He decided to pursue further studies in the computer sciences by entering into the first year of university at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. He then immigrated to Cambridge, Ontario, Canada, and started his second year of university at the University of Waterloo (a hot bed of talent for Microsoft). He graduated with an honours degree in computer science in 1985. After graduating from university, Steve had one interview at the Toronto Dominion Bank at their head office in Toronto and was immediately accepted before he had finished his interview. Steve worked as a mainframe software engineer for six years in Toronto, for several large well known financial companies like Royal Bank, before moving to Vancouver, Canada. He then moved away from the mainframe world and into the client server and desktop world, where he worked as a consultant for five years for many companies in Vancouver, such as the Vancouver Stock Exchange.

Since 1997, Steve has been helping the University of British Columbia improve the information technology infrastructure for two large departments. To this end, he has been developing IT policies and procedures, capacity planning, chairing and participating in various committees for IT initiatives, preparing for disaster recovery using virtualization technologies, and ensuring that high security of all servers, desktops, and networks is enforced.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (October 24, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1904811280
• ISBN-13: 978-1904811282
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,132,372 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What a waste, June 4, 2007

By 

B. Meijer (South Africa) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Building Websites with XOOPS : A step-by-step tutorial: Get your XOOPS website up fast using this easy-to-follow guide (Paperback)

If you already have a Xoops site up and running, this book is not for you. This is a rank beginner's guide to setting up your first website.

I'd figured out how to install and configure Xoops a few months earlier, and got almost nothing out of this book. It's also way too short (I read it in a day) and a lot of space is taken up by large, unnecessary screenshots.

If you skip the first two chapters (overview & installing Xoops) as well as the subsequent screenshots, you're left with under 70 pages of text! Building Websites with Xoops is rather overpriced for what you get.

The author doesn't go into enough detail when going through the popular modules. He just explains the (self-explanitory) functions in the Admin section, without exploring any deeper or giving advice on how you can REALLY customise Xoops.

There's also no info on how to create your own module, which is a pity. The 'Creating your own Themes' chapter is the best one, and happens to be the sample chapter you can download for free.

You're better off learning from the Web.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intro to Xoops, May 13, 2007

By 

J. Keller (California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Building Websites with XOOPS : A step-by-step tutorial: Get your XOOPS website up fast using this easy-to-follow guide (Paperback)

This is relatively short book about Xoops. I have never before used Xoops nor anything similar and found this book to be a good quick introduction. The organization of this book probably would not be easy to search for answers to future questions but it can get you started quickly. After reading the book and trying to build a web site I abandoned Xoops. I worried the current dependence of Xoops on tables for layout would lead to re-doing a lot of work when the system changes to use CSS for layout. Perhaps I do not understand how to use Xoops but it also appeared that I would have to put significant time into making modifications to accomplish my goals. The book gave me enough background that I felt I would be able to make the modification to do anything I wanted, but I felt the same amount of time would be better spent on Ruby on Rails.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If your building a website with xoops you need it, May 12, 2007

By 

karen (MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Building Websites with XOOPS : A step-by-step tutorial: Get your XOOPS website up fast using this easy-to-follow guide (Paperback)

really easy to follow and understand especially with me and I am such a newbie so I say its a go.