The Definitive Guide to Magento [Paperback]

Adam McCombs (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1430272295 | ISBN-13: 978-1430272298 | Publication Date: December 17, 2009 | Edition: 1st Edition.

This is a very necessary book. While Magento has been rapidly gaining steam as a popular e-commerce platform, the documentation has not been keeping pace, and the few books on the topic are very short and not always very useful. The Definitive Guide to Magento will not only help new web developers build an e-commerce site, it will also teach more experienced developers how to customize Magento to fit different scenarios. While Magento has only been production-ready since March of 2008, it already has over 750,000 downloads, and it has been adopted by several high-traffic businesses as their e-commerce solution. Our book offers these business and the developers they depend on a comprehensive guide to the top open source e-commerce platform.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Adam McCombs is a website designer and a front end developer with more than seven years of experience. He specializes in adapting open source frameworks such as Magento, Wordpress, Joomla!, and Drupal into functional custom website solutions for clients of small and medium-sized businesses. His work and blog can be found at www.mccombs.me.

A bio is not available for this author.

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1st Edition. edition (December 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430272295
• ISBN-13: 978-1430272298
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #106,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Maybe I Should Start Writing Books, February 6, 2010

By 

Jonathan Steinmann (TAMPA, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Definitive Guide to Magento (Paperback)

The Definitive Guide To Magento... really? Unless you're the kind of person that in general has a hard time using computers, about 60% of this book is a complete waste of time in my opinion. Even if you only have maybe a year of web design/development experience, just follow the download instructions online (which is basically download and run and localhost... not hard), and poke around the magento admin area yourself.

The book has an obsession with providing examples to connect to magento via xml and soap toward the end (which most people wont need to do with magento at all but at least it's more definitive like of a topic), but that's about the only thing worth mentioning that a developer would be interested in. Designing custom themes, apps, extensions, ecommerce modules, shipping modules, etc.etc... MIA or skimmed in a few pages. If the book was titled Getting Started with Using Magento Admin... i'd say the book did a good job... but I also wouldn't have bought it.

summary: if you're an absolute beginner with magento, have a hard time using computers in general, and really just want to know how to use magento once everything has been setup for you... this is a good book. If you're a web developer deploying your first magento ecommerce store... there's no depth or information in this book worthy of the price tag so I wouldn't recommend it. If you're a veteran and have created a magento ecommerce store in the past... don't even think about this book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Nothing you can't find online, February 2, 2010

By 

Colin Stuart "bluescrubbie" (Los Angeles,CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Definitive Guide to Magento (Paperback)

Magento is famous for it's incredible lack of documentation. To learn, you Google search for what you want.

I bought this overpriced book because I hoped paying for something would get me more comprehensive information than what's online. Sadly, this is not the case. It's basically an ordered regurgitation of what's on the web.

Everything I have tried to look up is not in the book, and it took me longer to find out, because the index is SO weak.

If you're the type of person who cannot stand searching for information online, you might find use for this, but I'll be returning it.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not exactly "Definitive", December 23, 2009

By 

K. Thompson (New Hampshire) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Definitive Guide to Magento (Paperback)

The "Definitive" in the title set my expectations higher than they should have been. The first half is pretty much a walk through of installing and setting up a Magento store without much value added. Then the book plunges into advanced topics with several chapters on how to customize code. The book is uneven at best.