The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications (Books for Professionals by Professionals) [Paperback]

John Mertic (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 2009 | ISBN-10: 1430224398 | ISBN-13: 978-1430224396 | Edition: 1

SugarCRM is a leading open-source customer relations management tool and development platform with nearly 5.5 million downloads, nearly 17,000 developers, and lots more users.

The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM is the first official SugarCRM book available to developers and users. This definitive book begins with a discussion of the SugarCRM platform components, namely MVC, Studio, Module Builder, authentication, and themes.

Next, you'll learn how to customize the modules SugarCRM comes with out of the box in an upgrade-safe manner. The text then presents an example application that a typical business might use and shows how to build it using SugarCRM, using both existing functionality as well as newly added functionality.

What you’ll learn

• Understand how the SugarCRM platform works
• Customize the modules that come with SugarCRM
• Build new modules and functionality into SugarCRM
• Explore MVC architecture, users/authentication, built-in modules, and other platform features
• Use SugarCRM Studio for customizations, logic hooks, and overriding existing code
• Build on top of SugarCRM using Module Builder, custom modules, and existing/custom modules mashups
• Design a complete application

Who this book is for

Any business application developers and consultants looking to build or deploy a custom business application. CIOs and IT administrators will also be interested.

Table of Contents

1. What Is SugarCRM?
2. MVC Architecture
3. Metadata Layer
4. Web Services
5. More Platform Features
6. Easy Customizations Using Studio
7. Workflows and Logic Hooks
8. Overriding Existing Code
9. Using Module Builder to Build Custom Modules
10. Building a Custom Module Manually
11. Designing a Complete Application

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John Mertic is a software engineer at SugarCRM. He has worked on several areas of the product, namely the Import module, Sugar Wireless, database back ends, and currently themes. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Kent State University and has several years of experience with PHP web applications. He has also contributed to many open source projects, most notably the PHP project, for which he is the creator and maintainer of the PHP Windows Installer. He has also authored several articles for PHP Architect, IBM developerWorks, and Apple Developer Connection.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (November 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430224398
• ISBN-13: 978-1430224396
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #437,807 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Mertic is a software engineer at SugarCRM, and has several years of experience with PHP web applications. An avid writer, he has been published in php|architect, IBM Developerworks, and in the Apple Developer Connector, and is the author of the book 'The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications'. He has also contributed to many open source projects, most notably the PHP project where is the creator and maintainer of the PHP Windows Installer.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good content, poor editing, May 12, 2010

By 

JS (Oak Ridge) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)

I have set up contact management systems at a couple of other small companies, and am charged with doing it for my current employer. The appeal of SugarCRM to us is the degree of customization allowed, and I bought "The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM:..." to shorten the learning curve.

Overall, I found this to be an effective overview, with somewhat useful instructions for working with the customization features of the software. The content is reliably solid, and seems based on thorough knowledge of the author. Often though, it seems to fall a little short on depth, and would benefit from more detailed examples of how to do specific tasks. For example, the section on relationships describes what relationships are available, but says little about how the choices change what you can do within SugarCRM. As a guide to the top level design of SugarCRM this is a good reference, and made it much easier for me to figure out where to look and how to approach some customizations we need. As a guide to "How do I do ...?" tasks, it could use some more depth.

About the editing - this has to be one of the most poorly edited book I've seen, ever. It clearly suffers from reliance on a Word style grammar checker. Page after page has errors that most grade school students could catch. I don't expect books of this type to be great literature, but this is supposed to be a professional level book, and the errors are frequent enough to be distracting. The editing quality makes it read like a cheap novel in quite a few places. Also, the table of contents page has an obvious numbering problem. In my copy it has Part 1, Part 2, etc., as it should. Every chapter though, no matter which part, is listed as Chapter 1.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gotta read this stuff!, December 21, 2009

By 

Roger Smyth "Rog" (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)

I just read this book, and it has been awesome. I have been working on a SugarCRM for the last year and this book has been very insightful. I really think that it all so address some of the advanced features that I was unsure about. I am really excited to learn all of the modifications that you can do to customize this application to suit my business needs. I am not sure what the other reviewer is talking about the code not working, but I found it all to work great for me. I would recommend this book for any beginner or someone like me who is just want to take SugarCRM to the next level in my business.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finally!, February 17, 2010

By 

Brian Woodard (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)

I recently completed a SugarCRM deployment for a client and have been struggling with getting up to speed on how to perform "upgrade safe" customizations to the application using only the documentation provided by Sugar. Version 5 features some major architectural changes and, unfortunately, most of the preexisting documentation and examples are written for version 4 or earlier. Add to that, the Application and Developer's Guides provided by Sugar are quite terse with little or no background on layout, design or philosophy.

Top feature here is that the book is written for the latest version (5.5.0). It also has a decent discussion of the Model/View/Control architecture and design philosophy that folks like me who are experienced with PHP/MySQL web development but relatively new to LAMP applications need in order to get oriented and better prepared to delve into the intricate innards of this popular application.

I am giving this book four stars because there are numerous minor typographical errors and the layout is not as clean as you would expect for a book in this price range.

I have found in working with this book that it provides just the right balance to the existing documentation while supplying the sorely needed details for the version 5 architecture. Kudos to John Mertic for undertaking the task to finally create The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM!