Customer Reviews

Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I recommend to every Joomla user who is less than "expert level" -- read this book! I have been working with Joomla 1.0 for about 5 months, so already had a basic understanding of many of the terms: component, module, etc. I purchased this book just before Christmas and took it with me to read on the holiday roadtrip. You know you are reading a great computer-related book when you can read and understand and make copious notes in the book margins...without sitting in front of a computer! Not only did it "fill in the blanks" about much of my understanding re: Joomla (any version), but I felt excited, and much more confident, about using Joomla 1.5. Great overview of Joomla, great details, great tips! A well-written user's guide. Thank you!

I am a professional web developer (mainly J2EE and PHP/MySQL); this book really helped me to take a decision: switch to Joomla!

The book starts with an introduction to Joomla! (and CMS in general) and then helps you to start your own site from scratch (fresh installation with NO sample content).

Then you'll learn how to develop a pure CSS template and after that there are three chapters devoted to the development of three different kind of sites: school, restaurant and blog.

Along with a dedicated site and forum (where Barrie replies to ALL our "stupid questions" ;) )... what else should I say?

Highly recommended!

This was a very good guide for getting your Joomla! site not only up and running, but running effectively. Barrie goes through a lot of information on how to get people to your site and hopefully have them come back. There are several examples throughout the book on how to organize a site and why you would want to organize it that way. I had created several Joomla! sites before getting this book, I wish that had happened the other way around. I'm much more efficient now and I was able to use the information in the book to sell 2 websites within a week of reading it.

The only chapter I had any trouble with was the Templating chapter. Since that's a subject that could (and should) have its own book, I wasn't expecting to be able to go design my own templates after reading it. I did read another book on CSS/XHTML afterwards and I'm going to go back and re-read the template chapter as I think it will make much more sense to me now.

I'd definitely recommend this book. It has a lot of information that will make you much more efficient and effective at designing your Joomla! sites.

I'm a web designer and programmer who bought this book in the hope that it'd reduce my time spent on forums and disorganized blog posts trying to hunt chunks of useful information on Joomla! , yet the book was far from fulfilling my expectations.
The book doesn't provide clear definitions , doesn't cover the necessary subjects thoroughly....makes a lot of assumptions and fails to communicate the structure of joomla clearly . Especially the last three chapters are a grandeur failure ( SEO+template making being the most important chapters if you really want to learn how to have some control over joomla and how to make your site efficient and accessible)

If you're really curious about the book, download the pdf version.
I highly recommend saving your money for smthing more useful and meaningful than this book.

Barrie has hit a home run with this book. If you are new to Joomla or making the transition to Joomla 1.5 this is the book you need to have on your shelf. While the online documentation for Joomla is detailed and available for all it lacks the overview and practical application knowledge that Barrie's book provides.

The book is well thought out and provides a wealth of information that only someone that has spent countless hours under the hood of the application can provide.

Everyone that is working or struggling to get a Joomla website live or modify an existing site, including customization of templates needs to have this book.

I am fairly new to the CMS arena. This was the first book I got about Joomla. I had no problems installing Joomla (AND Drupal too, the latter of which I found far more easier to understand structurally & logically than Joomla) on my iMac G5/Leopard. But as someone new, I wish the book was more thorough. As the author has said elsewhere in the book he does not cover every option/setting in the back end. Therein lay me frustration. A user guide I think should thoroughly cover all the relevant options/settings and explain what each of those do, why they should be set or not set, how they work etc. The book is lacking a bit in this area.

Moreover I found the book to be full of errors, wrong references etc. So I think the book wasn't thoroughly proofed. (this is especially painful to beginners as beginners tend to rely heavily on the accuracy of the content - once you get to the intermediate or advanced stages you may be able to spot these errors and know that they are errors.) The templates included in as supplementary study material had problems.

When I went to access the companion website, I found problems at the site too. (When trying to retrieve a lost username/password, it will bring you back to the same page with no comment/error message or suggestion of any kind! Finally I was able to go to the forum and tried to retrieve the login info. there. It worked but instead of taking me to the appropriate page. I was told the page could not be found!). On a different occasion when I tried to post a reply to a comment, it produced an error!

The point is, I found this kind of sloppiness (for lack of a less stronger word) throughout, in the book as well as in the supplementary material.

I am planning on supplementing this book with another book on Joomla 1.5. Still searching...!

Very good book. Especially if you want to learn how to manage YOUR site (with your layout, design, style etc). This book learns you how to create your own template (including css) and what tricks are needed for common problems: browser compatibility, scaling of fonts, seach engine optimization (seo), tableless design etc.
It's also good for beginners as it tells you all basics in the first chapters.
There are many links to other reference material which saves you a lot of time! Definitely recommended!

I think some people who have bought this book are disapointed because they were expecting a massively indepth review of Joomla's features, but that's not the goal of this book. Instead, this book's goal is to take the static website designer into the realm of CMS design using Joomla! It will give you a very good description of how Joomla! operates and how you use the system to create websites to roughly an advanced-beginner to intermediate level. If you already know how Joomla! works you will not learn a vast amount, but for myself (who didn't know CMS from Adam) it was extremely helpful and I've used this book to help me design a fully functioning website. For that I give this book a buy rating!

I am of two minds about this book. As a Joomla beginner but long-time geek, I found it necessary to acquire something more substantial than online documentation and forum posts to make the transition to a content management system. I bought this book after much nosing around (including the reviews here), and I do have to credit it for answering most of my newbie questions and getting me incrementally closer to Joomla competence. I learn a little more each time I dig through it, so yes, I would say I got my money's worth.

As a writer (a few technical books and lots of articles), however, I am reminded of the biggest problem with technical writing: material generated by someone highly conversant with a topic can too-easily fall into the trap of speaking the language of the field... forgetting that beginners are trying to make sense of it. The author obviously knows his stuff, but even as a geek I found many of the chapters confusing and never did get what I would call a clear grasp of organizational principles. The net effect is that each new article I add to my site involves a bit of experimental poking-about until the menus reflect the structure I want, and there is a sort of surprised delight when a download extension works the way I expected.

I don't think Joomla is really that hard, and it is exactly what I have needed to break out of a 15-year habit of hand-editing HTML (resulting in a sprawling site that breaks many rules of stylistic consistency and modern standards). But someone really needs to capture the fundamental CMS paradigm with absolute clarity, present it in a way that lets the reader build an internal model of the system with her own application in mind, and then introduce the tools non-trivially... with good examples and meaningful graphics. Maybe someone has done this already, but I have not found it.

For a Joomla expert, all this is unnecessary, of course, and that's part of the problem with books about software tools. Identifying the target audience is the first problem when starting a book, and holding onto that all the way through a long brain dump can be particularly tricky. I don't think this book is very consistent in that department, even though it certainly helped me get started and triggered enough "aha!" moments to get me past the "hello, world" stage. But my non-geeky, blog-literate partner bogged down completely in the early chapters, so I don't think it really works for a true beginner.

Admittedly, stepping someone through a sprawling system that can take just about any form is a very tall order, for there is no obvious beginning-to-end sequencing (and there is plenty of allure in the esoterica). But I believe it could have been done much more smoothly and linearly: the essential truths about menu structures and the role of modules vs components vs plug-ins, while all stated in various places, require quite a bit of digging and re-reading.

Being new to Joomla, but not web design and development, the book had me engaged up to the chapter on Search Engine Marketing. This topic alone seems to be the author's real interest and for this he does have some good insights. But my enthusiasm ends here.

Mastering CSS is crucial to having control over the look of your site. At best CSS is a complex subject and I promise that unless you have extraordinary mind-bending abilities at reading between the lines, you will not penetrate this mish-mash explanation of how to put together, or edit, a pure CSS Joomla template as attempted in chapter 9. I would rather wrestle a wild boar, or crack ciphers from the Wehrmacht Enigma machine than waste any more time attempting to untangle such poorly thought out material.

This book needs a major and careful rewrite. And I do mean major. If you have any experience with clearly written, precisely crafted, well edited technical books --as in anything written by David Powers, you will quickly realize that this 'guide' leads nowhere.