Magento: Beginner's Guide [Paperback]

William Rice (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 15, 2009 | ISBN-10: 1847195946 | ISBN-13: 978-1847195944

Create a dynamic, fully featured, online store with the most powerful open source e-commerce software

• Step-by-step guide to building your own online store
• Focuses on the key features of Magento that you must know to get your store up and running
• Customize the store's appearance to make it uniquely yours
• Clearly illustrated with screenshots and a working example

In Detail

Magento is the world's most evolved e-commerce solution. It runs on the Apache/MySQL/PHP platform. From one installation, you can control multiple storefronts, all sharing customer and product information. Magento's templates and themes enable you to customize the look and feel of your store, even optimizing it for mobile phones. Extensions enable you to connect Magento to a large number of payment gateways and shipping services. Modular code enables you to upgrade your Magento installation while retaining your customizations. Support is provided free by an active open source community and by subscription to Varien, the company behind Magento.

Magento is one of the most exciting, flexible, and customizable e-commerce systems. It offers you an extensive suite of powerful tools for creating and managing an online store. As your online store grows, you can be sure that this robust e-commerce system can handle your needs. However, getting started with Magento can be difficult without the right guidance.

This book provides that guidance in the form of a step-by-step approach to building a simple, effective online store. The book covers the key features of Magento that will help you get your store up and running. It guides you through installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders.

When you create an online store with Magento, you usually follow a defined series of steps. This book is arranged to support that process. Each chapter shows you how to get the most from one step.

You will learn to customize the default Magento storefront so that it becomes your store and also about Magento's directory structure and where some of the elements of a store are customized. This experience will help you if you decide to go beyond this book and install new themes or create your own themes.

As you work your way through each chapter, your store will grow in scope and sophistication. By the time you finish this book, you should have a basic but complete, working online store.

What you will learn from this book?

• Install and configure Magento and add products to your online catalog
• Create categories and attributes to build your catalog of products
• Enhance your products with descriptions, images, and inventory information
• Create product categories to help your customers navigate your online store
• Automatically apply sales tax rules to different shipping addresses and different types of products
• Present and sell products in groups and sets
• Display products related to the one that is being viewed by a customer
• Offer your customer choices for a product's size, color, or other attribute and give discounts based on quantities
• Accept payments using Paypal, credit cards, and checks/money orders and offer a variety of shipping options
• Create your own, customized shipping rates and connect to shippers such as UPS, FedEx, and USPS

Approach

This book will provide you with step-by-step instructions for installing, configuring, and using Magento to run your own e-commerce site. We will set up an example store in the book with enough information to adapt the instructions according to your needs.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for anyone who wants to create an online store using Magento. If you are a non-technical person and are discouraged by the complexity of this powerful e-commerce application, this book is ideal for you.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

William Rice

William Rice is a software training professional who lives, works, and plays in New York City. His indoor hobbies include writing books and spending way too much time reading sites like slashdot and 43folders. His outdoor hobbies include orienteering, rock climbing, and edible wild plants (a book on that is coming someday).

William is fascinated by the relationship between technology and society: how we create our tools, and how our tools in turn shape us. He is married to an incredible woman who encourages his writing pursuits, and has two amazing sons.

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (April 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847195946
• ISBN-13: 978-1847195944
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.6 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #474,383 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

William Rice is a software training professional who lives, works, and plays in New York City. He is the author of books on Moodle, Magento, Blackboard, and software training.

His indoor hobbies include writing books and spending way too much time reading slashdot.org. His outdoor hobbies include orienteering, trying to keep up with his sons on the playground, and practicing archery within site of JFK Airport.

William is fascinated by the relationship between technology and society: how we create our tools, and how our tools in turn shape us. He is married to an incredible woman who encourages his writing pursuits, and has two amazing sons.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Magento primer May 29, 2009

By Impartial 1

Format:Paperback

I purchased this book to get a better understanding of Magento, as I am customizing a store for a client. You get the basics with this book, covering things like installing/configuring the store, adding simple and grouped products, learning how taxes and shipping are handled, and the order processing workflow.

While some may be disappointed by its simplistic overview of Magento, I understood this before I bought it. You can get all the information in this book and more from Magento's site, including video webinars. But, it is useful having a physical copy with you to read during your commute or during some off-time and it's way easier on the eyes than a computer screen.

Designers should know that the topic of themes/templating is NOT covered in this book. For that, refer once again to the Magento site, and don't forget Google. That's why I have been doing.

The one good thing about the book -- and this is mainly for those creating a store for a client -- is the chapter on order processing. It provides lots of screenshots and walks you through how one would handle an order. This is a great section for the client to have, since they (or their staff) will be managing this. On that note, getting the PDF version would save you the trouble of scanning/photocopying that chapter. You can get both the physical book and e-book as a bundle from the PacktPub site.

Most recently, Magento released its own official beginner's guide as a PDF file that you pick up for about $20. Look into this, as it's almost half the price of this book and should have much of the same content that this book has.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Book but Out of Date!!! May 9, 2011

By P. Thompson

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I was so excited to receive this book because I am a true beginner with Magento and was not finding good info on how to start with this program. I found the book to be easy to understand and read but it was written in 2009 and about 50% of the items in the updated version of MagentoGo was not covered in the book. I found myself having to sort of translate the old book into the new interface and also noticed that many items were not addressed at all. Much of the layout and organization in the software is different than the book which frustrated me on top of having to learn about this new E-commerce solution.

Unfortunately, Packt has not put out an updated book and there is virtually no one else with a beginners book aside from the users manual which is not as user friendly.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Beginner's Guide March 31, 2009

By Erasmus

Format:Paperback

I had been struggling with trying to figure out how to use basic
fuctions in Magento until I got a copy of the book (I used the ebook version). It accelerated progress 200%.

The book is well laid out and walks you through the basic for setting up a store step by step. Explanations are well thought out and clear.

Highly recommended!