Customer Reviews

Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development: The Professional Guide to Programming Joomla!

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

 

 

If I didn't already know MVC, Joomla 1.5 and had made components before I think this book would be useless.


If you have dabbled in developer code however and Joomla 1.5 this is a great resource.

This book lacks examples of building finished components.

If it combined the style of other books like learn joomla 1.5 as well as having this great resource of information it would be worth solid gold.

Without it and without a good index It takes time to find what you are after. Once you find it however it always provides great, accurate information.

The really frustrating thing about this book is the style and lack of indexing. When I buy a technical reference, the most important thing is being able to look up any relevant term or function name and immediately find the place to read about that. This book has the terms subcategorized under other terms that only make sense if you already know Joomla programming! I seriously almost never find the term I'm looking for in the index. This really drives me crazy. When I have found the area I'm looking for, however, I've been pretty happy with the quality of explanation provided. Indexing is all important.

It's a good book. But it's got some short-comings that makes it not a complete reference for Joomla 1.5. The organization is a little bit fragmented. All the examples are snippets and are never complete listings. This makes it a difficult book to use for a brand new learning Joomla developer. If it was a complete reference tutorial, it being the only book that you would ever need, that newbies and experts alike could pick it up and gleam from it I would have given it a 5 stars. I would have given it a 4 if the Appendix that has a quick look up was clearer on what section your in and the section titles were more distinguishable. But it has produced a decent amount of answers to my periodic questions. It's a nice book to have but far from the only book you'll ever need on Joomla. So I gave it 3 stars.

I recently read "Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development" by James Kennard, and I must say I really enjoyed it. Every time I read a book about Joomla! framework and extension development, I get all sorts of new ideas. This time was no exception. The book provides a thorough description of the topics surrounding Joomla! 1.5 extension development, and it is a great reference book. I would not recommend reading the book cover-to-cover, but I think it is a great resource to have handy when attempting to develop extensions for Joomal! 1.5. The book was written for experience PHP developers who already have a working knowledge of Joomla! For those wanting to learn Joomla! extension devleopment, I recommend starting with Joe Leblanc's book, "Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development", and having "Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development" as a reference for getting more in depth with the framework.

Pros: gives some good overviews and dives deep into some concepts.
Cons: does not give adequate examples. It is definetly not an advanced book or "Mastering".

I returned the book.

This is a reasonable introductory text and it gave me what I needed when I read it after Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development: Creating Modules, Components, and Plugins with PHP in the same series.

However, it is let down by a poor index and the fact that the coverage is too much 'type this' and 'do this' rather than helping the reader understand why things need to be done in a certain way and how to find the necessary resources to address new problems.

The book was a good resource for me to get to grips with the Joomla 1.5 API, having had very little experience of Joomla and PHP development in general, however having a good background in programming. I feel the book has been written with developer's like me in mind, i.e. people who have knowledge of general web application programming but little or no knowledge of Joomla. The way the book has been sectioned progresses nicely, starting with a brief intro to Joomla (for completeness' sake), a Joomla programming Getting Started chapter and then delves into the API per se. It introduces the general classes Joomla uses, and how they relate to each other. Each chapter then introduces and describes more enhanced functionality, such as accessing the database, developing components, the MVC model, and keeps on building, with each chapter building and adding to the knowledge learned in the previous chapters.

Overall I think this book is a good start for anyone delving into the Joomla Development world. It introduces the concepts, explains, and with that knowledge you can go ahead and dive into your development.

The author understands this subjects probably quit well.
He doesn't understand that the buyers of this book probably don't!
Explain the subject instead of show us how intelligent you are.

I'm a long-time programmer and was looking to create some extensions using the Joomla platform. There aren't a lot of books written on this subject, so I bought this (Kindle version) and "Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development" by LeBlanc (hard-copy). This book lacks a cohesive narrative to give the reader a general understanding of the Joomla code platform. As a programmer, you're interested in the method/style to that the existing library developers intended for their code to be used. This book doesn't give that. Instead, it briefly gives code snippets for various tasks in an almost arbitrary order--not very good for the reader's retention or understanding. A book "should be" well written to help the reader understand a subject. With this book, you're almost better off just paging through the Joomla online documentation and piecing it together yourself.

On top of that, the (Kindle) book is wrought with typos and errors, so it looks like the writer just didn't care that much about the entire production.

The LeBlanc book is better than this one.

However, any 1.5 books are marginally valuable since the release of Joomla 1.6+ and its significant platform changes. Since there aren't any version 1.6+ extension developers' books (as of this writing), you may be best understanding MCV development and just reading the online Joomla documentation.

Background: I am almost new to Joomla! though I have been programming in PHP since many years now. I am mainly a Python developer, I develop with Django and Pylons on regular basics, and I have to say that I find the MVC Joomla! implementation very weak (honestly I have to say that I am quiet critic on PHP generally speaking, so maybe my opinion is biased).
But for a project I could't use Python but I needed to be proficient in Joomla! in a very quick time, in order to be able to write a component following the MVC design pattern.
I have starting collecting many materials on the web, mostly on the Joomla! web site: in many case the material was not as updated and completed as I wished.
Then I started looking at the Amazon web site for books about this topic, and I have selected this one, and I must say that this choices was a life-saving!
After reading the whole book I can safely say that this is a must-have book for every serious developer who whish to master how to customize with this popular CMS.
The whole stuff is very well packaged in a nice order: in the first two chapters there is a gentle introduction to the topic.
Chapter 3 will teach you the Joomla! database structure and the database naming conventions. You will also learn how to query the database with the Joomla! classes of the framework, including the base CRUD methods.
From chapter 4 starts the core of the book: in that chapter there is an excellent overview about the structure of the extensions (components, modules and plugins), followed by 3 chapters dedicated to each kind of extension with a dedicated tutorial.
So in chapter 5 you will design and develop a component, in chapter 6 a module and in chapter 7 a plugin. Code is very well documented (and it is actually working if you like to go along with it), and the training is really very well structured.
Finally at chapter 8 you get more informations about component backends, in chapter 9 there are useful instructions for customizing the page, chapter 10 is dedicated to how manage XML, AJAX, LDAP and Web services, chapter 11 to Error handling and security, chapter 12 to utilities and other classes (Dates, File system, arrays, trees and log files).
The book ends a rich appendix about Jooomla! core classes.
As I have already said, this is a must-have book for developers working with Joomla!, and I think the price of this book is very worth even only for reading chapters 4 and 5 (about 130 pages long) that are the core of the book and that will put you definitely in the right way for Joomla! development.
Side note: frankly I don't understand the critic comments before mine, I think this book is really excellent and will guide the developer to be proficient in Joomla! in a very gentle way. So for me, 5 stars without doubt! Maybe it is not an entry level book, this is the possible reason for which some commenter was very critical (but the title says "mastering" not "learning").