Customer Reviews

Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development: Creating Modules, Components, and Plugins with PHP

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

At half the cost of a comprehensive book, I expected a good bit of detail on development.

This book doesn't demonstrate much beyond what you can get from the demo's online already. And it doesn't provide any hidden gems of knowledge or tips of any sort.

All in all, a disappointment and a waste of money

At first sight this book looks great. It is concise and gives a good introduction from the start to build Joomla extensions. It does not waste pages explaining how to program in SQL and PHP. You are supposed to have mastered that. The book has a major weak point. For the main part it just shows lots of code, but does not explain anything about the API classes and how they relate. After reading the book and trying to create your own extension, it feels like you have not understood anything really.

A second drawback is that the author seems not to bother about testing the sample code. It contains several very obvious bugs, eg using a functou JOutputFilter instead of JFilterOutput. This is annoying.

Summarized, the book may give you a small start but is insufficient for seriuous development. The sad thing is that the official Joomla documentation is in a very alpha stage of development.

I certainly agree with those who said this book is way too sparse, weighing in at 176 non-packed pages. For the same audience this book is intended for I would instead recommend "Professional Joomla" by Dan Rahmel. It covers the same material plus a great deal more and it costs less money. It even gives more explanation and examples of building components, modules, and plugins, things "Learning Joomla" is supposed to focus on.

As the publish date shows, this book was brought to market quite a while before J!1.5 was code complete. I don't know if it's that or if the developer was too used to 1.0 development (there is a dramatic difference) but either way, this book co-mingled 1.0 and 1.5 development practices too much, and just basically glanced over the entire MVC architecture that was built into the 1.5 release of J! I'm a little disappointed as I was expecting more, being a fan of Leblanc, his knowledge and helpfulness in Joomla related things.

For your money, you are much better off purchasing 'Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development' by James Kennard. It has helped me immensly in understanding the new J! framework and APIs.

I imagine an expert wouldn't need this tutorial, but if you're familiar with PHP and mySQL, and you want to build some Joomla! components, this is by far the most comprehensive resource that I've found.

The content in this book is so hard to understand that you will save money and time finding the same information online.

This was a very well done book. It requires some experience with PHP (and even with, there are some new conventions used). The book takes you through building a component piece by piece. Without knowledge of PHP, you might get lost because you have to modify the code repeatedly - chapter by chapter.

Read up on your PHP syntax and functions first, then give this book a try.

This is a very good starter book that explains a lot of newbie questions you may have about Joomla development. It does kind of pull you by a nose rings in some spots by telling you you need to do this but no real explanation of why. But considering how much information is packed into this small book, its acceptable. This book won't make you an expert Joomla developer but it will have you picked up by your boot straps and capable of asking the right questions to find any answers it didn't contain.

Although light on detail and lacking in the background necessary to help the reader work out how to find more information effectively, this is a good introductory lesson and can be worked through in just a few hours, giving the reader a good grounding in how to develop 1.5 extensions.

I expect a more comprehensive approach from this book, including a very good review of the new Joomla 1.5 API, and deep suggestions to build better components, modules and plug-ins for this CMS.

But my expectations were not fulfilled. God book, but not so good.

If you have no experience building/maintaining components for Joomla, this is a good start, but if you are an experience developer looking for god reference and fresh information, maybe this book will be incomplete for your purposes.