Customer Reviews

Professional Joomla! (Programmer to Programmer)

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

 

 

The book content is ok, but too basic. Instead of 50 pages of Examples of "successfull sites", maybe the author could have expanded on some of the examples. For example, the example on MVC patterns is so simple as to be meaningless. If I wanted to "study the Joomla source code" as the author suggests, I wouldn't have spent money on a book.

The downloaded example source code doesn't match the book and often doesn't quite work.

I did learn quite a bit about Joomla, but I always had the nagging feeling that the book wasn't finished and was rushed to print.

A lot of "filler" material and poorly written on top of it, many typos as well that are distracting and get in the way of the material. Only useful with a lot of background in Joomla. Didn't help me at all. I found Joomla!:A User's Guide far better written with clearer examples of the underlying concepts. I understand this is a "professional" book - but it was really quite lightweight and it felt very padded. Doesn't Wrox use technical editors anymore? The language sounds very much like a non-native speaker - which is fine - but editing is always called for - for everyone.

I read this book yesterday in about 1/2 hour while sitting at the cafe in B0rd3rs. It could be a useful intro to Joomla for a novice or non-technical business user. It scratches the surface of about every topic related to Joomla and building or running a web site, but it has very little detailed information. The chapter on Joomla's weaknesses was interesting, but other than that, most of the information is available on the Joomla, PHP, Apache and MySql sites.

Nowhere in this book are the fundamental concepts of how Joomla puts a page together laid out clearly. I'm a web programmer tasked with learning Joomla while moving an existing static web site onto it. I understand PHP, CSS, and the MVC pattern quite well. This book was less than useless -- it was a time vampire that set me back at least half a day on the project.

I find Wrox books to be questionable overall, but I gave this one a shot. "Professional" and "programmer-to-programmer" it's not. As a programmer, I don't need several chapters devoted to how to make my site a success in the market place, or a dozen pages on how to create a rounded rectangle layout in CSS and Photoshop -- YES! that's actually what you're going to get in this book -- tutorials on SEO and Photoshop that aren't as good as what you can Google up for free.

What I needed was a book that talked specifically about how Joomla assembles content; both how to use the interface to create and maintain a large site and where in the PHP code the hooks go for the content. After several hours, not only had I not learned this, I couldn't even find relevant information in the book. Avoid this.

Wrox, you're dead to me.

Although I have been involved in many forms of application development (including 20 years of various Oracle products) over the years I haven't used PHP or MySQL before begining to develop a Joomla website. To me this book has been exactly what I've been looking for! I'm not looking to make a career of Joomla development but I want to add functionality to the JSN Epic Pro template I've been using and this is answering my questions nicely.

I haven't experienced a problem with the way things are described. To me it has seemed very clear and has guided me through one topic after another very well. I went through several resources on the Internet and I'm still glad I picked this up. I am experimenting with MySQL database modifications and creation of new Joomla extensions. So far it's been very smooth. I had picked up "Mastering Joomla 1.5" by James Kennard and found it inaccessable because it assumed more PHP background than I have. I can imagine that would be a good guide for someone who has used these technologies but I'm very content starting with this.

For someone in my category I would definitely recommend purchasing it.

The book provides a reasonable review of the main technologies that allow you to customise components of the Joomla System. There is probably a bit too much padding (e.g. pp.53-54 - a list of default Joomla CSS styles takes up 2 pages) but the main drawback is the large number of errors in the code examples. For example, on page 166 there is a blatant omission of "joomla" from the url used to test a basic Ajax component. Also there are many other errors arising from updates to the Joomla code itself, some of which are corrected in the downloadable code provided on the website. For example, the class JMenuBar on page 151 is now JToolBarHelper. So far, having reached the end of chapter 7, I have been unable to get more than a couple of the simpler examples to work as printed in the book. Most of them require adjustment, which is good in the sense that it teaches you how to program Joomla, though not in the way intended by the author. On the other hand I doubt that too many readers will have the patience to fix everything that is broken in this book. In a nutshell I think this book is already out of date and is carelessly written.

This book was written by a writer, not a Joomla developer. The goal was to fill enough pages to make a book. The book is positioned to help developers learn how to create a Joomla web site. It is nothing but filler.

For example, in Chapter 3 entitled, "Developing Custom Templates," we encounter five pages on how to use Photoshop to create rounded corners on modules. Then in the same chapter you'll find a section on how to create CSS for mobile devices, entitled, "Creating a Cell Phone - Centric CSS." Pardon me, but what does that have to do with creating custom templates in Joomla?

Then you have a whole 14 page chapter on Design Patterns. The author treats each design pattern with one paragraph without any code, useless.

The book is all filler, a whole lot of nothing, and to make matters worse, there is not an understandable organization. This is a writer writing about a topic that he really doesn't understand himself. Don't waste your money.

This is a light read containing a reasonable amount of guidance on editing templates and a regurgitation of the stuff you can get by googling joomla 1.5 (with many edit errors).

However, there is very little meat with almost nothing covering any of the underlying principles and a terrible guide to writing a component (that ignores MVC entirely).

Its not worth the money I paid for it.

this book is ver clear and well done, it explains all the covered topics with simple but effective examples. The topics are all about Joomla 1.5 so don't buy it if you're interested in Joomla 1.0

A new phenomena like the Joomla! content management system doesn't come along very often. When better ways of doing things first happen, there is a recognizable pattern. The experts dismiss the item, the mainstream press ignores the item, and all the while the first users blissfully take advantage of the situation. Examples include AutoCAD in 1985, Turbo Pascal in 1986, the Internet itself in 1992, and I'll let you fill in the rest.

Now that Joomla has reached the ripe old age of 1.5, Dan Rahmel's book is the first to gently guide the novice towards whatever level he hopes to reach, from simple user to commercial developer.

The examples are not always in sync with the latest 1.5 release, but that happens when you have an evolving product. And it is sometimes dificult to figure out just what reader expertise is presumed in the areas of Server Tech, PHP, SQL, HTML and CSS.

In site design, and in training others in site design, I've personally experienced the same difficulties, finally adopting a philosophy of "pick up what you need as you need it" that seems to work. You know the PHP/SQL/HTML/CSS/??? that you use, and you learned it because you needed it. It's not always pretty out there.

For real basics we have the online Joomla docs and wiki. These are improving daily, but are not all that easy to learn from.

For real in-depth we have the forums. It seems like there are a thousand users and developers like the author who not only know this stuff, but are quite willing to share the knowledge with the world. (And of course, a few jerks to make life interesting)

For an organized plan for the beginning user and developer we have this book. Well beyond a Dummies text. Not quite a cookbook.