Customer Reviews

MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide: Install, manage, and customize your MediaWiki installation

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although a comparison cannot be made, because of the lack of competition (discarding the online help at MediaWiki.org) the MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide is a good and must have reference for anyone working with MediaWiki as administrator but also as user, offering almost anything one would want to know to start off with, to maintain and to customise and even hack a wiki installation. For those wanting to go a bit further with writing real PHP code for creating extensions, custom wiki markup and special pages, the book offers some nice code examples to work with and to modify to one's needs.

The book could have benefited from somewhat richer content, such as more references to additional sources on the Internet and especially something like break-out boxes presenting experiences from admins of major wiki real life implementations. Next to that it appears that some more time should have been spend on a better index, correcting language, typos and structuring in general.

My book rating: 8

To summarise: the pros and cons

Pros:

+ Almost everything you will need for a basic MediaWiki installation, its maintenance and some customisation is available in this book. It is a complete reference for admins but certainly also for users, that would like some basic understanding of MediaWiki.
+ Very nice and easy to grasp examples of skin customisation and creation (I am no PHP expert!).
+ Good example on creating an article rating system extension and accompanying special page. With this knowledge and some additional PHP you will be able to try out a couple of your extension idea's quite easily I guess.
+ There is a nice bonus chapter (11) presenting 7 extensions and some support on how to install them.
+ A book is so much easier than an online source! Of course this is not a pro for this book per se, but for others as well.

Cons:

+ Missing 1: some practical case studies of real life MediaWiki implementations and preferably interviews with the admins of the practise of maintaining a wiki
+ Missing 2: More attention to anti-vandalism tools out there, dedicated to preventing rather than cleaning-up.
+ Missing 3: A good index: the index at the end of the book is way too brief to be of real value for someone trying to find something back in the book.
+ Missing 4: Too little in-text references and no references section in the book, for further reading or information, like most important forums for those looking for help (like the MediaWiki Mailing List Archive and MWusers.com).
+ Sometimes the English used suggests a lack of some decent editorial oversight (or shall I call it charming?)
+ Chapter 1, describing wiki's in relation to weblogs, forums and CMS systems and the position in Web 2.0 is not really convincing. Furthermore, although alternative wiki systems are briefly mentioned, no real and "honest" comparison is made.
+ Images and tables are not numbered, which is not good for readability.
+ The typographical distinction between paragraph and sub-paragraph could have been better

I think this book sells purely because there is little in the way of alternatives. The documentation in the MediaWiki wiki itself is patchy, jumbled, and confusing to navigate. I wanted a more 'polished' reference book, and this is the only book on Amazon devoted solely to MediaWiki.

Content-wise it is _OK_. There is very little in here that isn't already available on-line, but at least it is presented in a more logical manner. The first half of the book is really aimed at contributors to MediaWiki, such as creating and editing a page, uploading and inserting images, and creating tables. True, Administrators will also need to know this, but it's probably safe to assume that anyone purchasing an "Administrator's Guide" already knows this. Certainly, it didn't teach me anything new. The second half gets more useful, covering administration of access rights, creation of skins, managing namespaces, and so on. That said, it does include huge swathes of code, which take up a fair bit of room - if you don't want to add the 'page rating' the author provides, then it's just a waste of space.

The book is also missing some key information. There's a section on thumbnailing images, but the book neglects to mention that the functionality to deliver this isn't included in MediaWiki and has to be installed separately. (At least in the version I installed, but as there's no information provided on the different versions of MediaWiki there's no way of knowing whether this is why...) It's also vague on some tasks, such as "Figure out how to run PHP scripts from the command line."

My biggest problem with the book is the quality of the writing. This is absolutely appalling. Maybe I'm a bit more sensitive to these things, being a Technical Writer by profession, but the amount of spelling errors and grammatical mistakes is absolutely shocking. I found almost 100 errors just whilst I was casually reading it - I'm sure there would be many more if I looked more closely. Most of these would have been detected by using a spellchecker, and many of the rest would have probably been picked up by Word's grammar checker. For the most part this is just annoying and distracting, but some, such as repeatedly misspelling the HTML HREF tag as HERF, are just unforgivable. It hardly puts ones faith in the author - if they can't get this right, what's the chance of the sample code being correct and actually working? But what is really shocking is that the book lists five editors, two reviewers and a proofreeader in the "Credits". None of these people deserve any credit whatsoever, as the quality of this book is below what I would expect from a 15-year old.

In fact, I suspect that the book was actually written by a 15 year-old. The tone used, the examples (the wiki developed throughout the book is a wiki for ghost stories...), the logic of exposition, is all very 'youthful'. It's as though some teenager with an Internet connection and a bit of time on their hands had built themselves a wiki, and then someone had remarked to his parents "Wow, little Timmy knows so much about wikis I bet he could write a book on it!".

Given the lack of competition you may want to go out and buy this book anyway. Just don't expect a detailed technical reference, and be prepared to overlook the frequent grammar and spelling errors...

I downloaded the mediawiki code and configured a simple wiki, and then said "Now what?" Fortunately, I ordered this book, and happened to have a flight shortly after receiving it, so I had a few relatively uninterrupted hours to read it. I felt like I moved from just scratching the surface of this powerful tool to really being able to tweak it and stretch it to do some really interesting things.

I was disappointed in a few typos early in the book related to linking, the errors made things much more confusing than they needed to be. But other than that, I found the flow of the book to be very good, moving from installation to basic editing to templating to adding custom tags (which I've now done for my install).

I've pretty much read the book cover to cover, and left it with my client last time I saw him. He, too, read it on his flight home, and told me he is quite jazzed about doing some new things with the system that he never knew were even options.

If you want to manage a wiki, reading this book is much, much easier than using the online documentation. Highly recommended.

I bought this book because I'd been looking in vain for information on customizing MediaWiki, having hit the proverbial brick wall trying to get beyond the basic configuration on my team's intranet wiki. I was a bit hesitant after reading earlier reviews mentioning that this book was poorly written, but bought it anyway being the *only* book available on MediaWiki.

Given my prior (although minimal) exposure to MediaWiki, I was able to skim through the first four chapters rather quickly. The second half of the book has promising chapter titles, and does contain several code snippets & hacks, but I continually found myself wondering how a professional title made it to press with such poorly written prose. I found the explanations of key concepts to be rather circular, never clearly communicating "the big picture".

Bottom line: If you're starting from scratch, this book should get you started & help as a reference if you need some hacks later on. Otherwise I'd skip it.

The book is relatively short and moves at the wrong pace through various topics. I found Chapter 3: Starting MW, and most of Chapter 4: Advanced Formatting not helpful, since they describe the formatting that every Wikipedia user should know by now.

The book too quickly glossed over relatively tricky customization and PHP hacks, which should have been covered in more depth. I did not see anything significant about cashing or performance, although security was noted quiet a bit.

This book gives exactly what it promises: a *tutorial* for
MediaWiki administators'. I agree with the positive reviews
and I would only like to add the version covered is 1.9.0.
Perhaps the main complaint is the book is expensive.

When I started the wiki DharmaFlix.com, I had no experience in administering a wiki - just a hope and a prayer. For the vital information on wikis, which is in the details, I scoured the large amount of information available on the web, especially at the mediawiki website: http://www.mediawiki.org/. This was certainly helpful and got the site started. But I really wanted a comprehensive Bible of Wikis, that would allow me to grasp the full potentiality of this web development platform. I looked for a book to serve this need, and lo and behold, MediaWiki Administor's Tutorial Guide had just been published. Well I immediately bought it and read it cover to cover. It is very readable and I would think a current must-read for anyone desiring to found a wiki. DharmaFlix.com is flourishing very much because of this book and its author, Mizanur Rahman.

I am new to wikis and this was an excellent resource for me. Yes, there are a few errors here a there but I still consider it a very good reference. After this book you will be able to do more deep research on your own.

This book is based on version 1.9.0, which is clearly stated in page 20.

I recommend the book "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" for editors of your custom mediawiki, but for administrators, this book: "MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide is well worth the $40.00.

I like that this book covers so much, yet doesn't try to cover everything. I'm sure that you can find the rest of what you need for a complete reference by Googling and reading the mediawiki that supports mediawiki.

As a resource, this book is lacking an easy to use index, and the author seems more interested in writing about ghost stories, then writing a guide to creating and managing wikis.

The content doesn't seem to warrent the price tag either. It may be good for beginners, but only if the reader really likes ghosts.