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.

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.

I am an experienced PHP/MySQL programmer and I am going to switch to Joomla! very soon as I think that it could save me a lot of work on dynamic sites where customers need to add/modify very often contents and articles.

Well, of course Joomla! default content (articles) layout and behaviour will not fit any customer need and so I'd need to develop my own custom extensions: this is how this book comes in help!

I have been able to develop my own custom component (with rich editor, sorting, publish/unpulish, categories handling features) in three days following the book recommendations.

Yes the book is quite thin and the price is not very adequate, but its content is pure gold! clear, concise and very useful.

I read this book pretty quickly.

It is rather thin and not over loaded with content and for the price Isnt good value which is the basis of my 4 star rating.

The content is accurate but often doesnt break down into details what you are doing. This is great if you are happy to simply make components and modules etc that are very simple but it definately lacks enough meat to make anything more than a learner component.

If you are absolute newbie to MVC and Joomla 1.5 custom coding then it could be worth your while. If you are an experienced developer however get the mastering joomla 1.5 Extension development.

As a developper, this book help me a lot to start in Joomla. I appreciate reading for several reasons:

1) it is 100% Joomla, no PHP or SQL explanation. If a needed a PHP explanation, I would buy a book about PHP;
2) cover a lot: module, component, plugin;
3) very oriented object programmed;
4) explain "Model, View, Controller" concept;
5) Good learning curve, create a basic component then go deeper with the MVC concept;

Sure there is some type, but that will make you stronger :)

Sébastien D'Errico
sebastien@hollox.net