Customer Reviews

The Definitive Guide to Magento

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2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Apress has a huge fail on this.
* Several chapters are devoted to just showing you what you will see once Magento is installed
* Frequent user tasks are not covered, like removing the default call outs on a page. Instead, time is spent explaining where to add product prices.
* The images used are VERY fuzzy and frequently can hardly be read.

Compared to other Apress books, like the one for The GIMP, this looks like it was print at a kinkos and rushed at that. Boo.

Cut to the short, this book is like a manual to the interface you see, the Magento's front-end and back-end.

The writing in some parts of the book, is vague and not clear enough to understand. It's possible to find lots of key-points in one small paragraph.

The Magento's installation progress is simply described in few steps, which in reality is a headache!

Last chapters are much more better written and are much more similar to the taste of a professional developer.

Being new to Magento I found that this book extremely helpful. Several of the beginning chapters are devoted to exploring both the public and administrative sides of Magento. There are also several advanced chapters devoted to extensions, API references and advance programming. Of the other two Magento books I've purchased and read (including Magento's guide), I found this book to be the most thorough.


I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn more about Magento and I look forward to a more advanced Magento book by the same Authors.

There is no code in this book. It's a book about a php OScommerce application but there is no actual php code inside the book. What is inside are screenshots of the user interface and basic information you'll find on at least 40 Magento related webpages for free. This 'definitive guide' will really only help you if you do not know what Magento is or does and have never installed a php application in your life. Look at the sample; it does not get any better. You have been warned.

Anyone who has attempted to use Magento knows that there's a complete lack of documentation. The Definitive Guide to Magento does an excellent job filling that void by describing each of Magento's functions, on the front end and back end. There's a walk through on creating themes, creating modules and making minor modifications to your Magento installation. I'd recommend this book to anyone who is interested in installing and using Magento in any capacity.