Customer Reviews

SilverStripe: The Complete Guide to CMS Development (Wiley)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The day I first heard of SilverStripe, was also the day that I discovered that a book for SilverStripe was in the works. After a few days of playing with the CMS I definitely wanted to get the book. By shear luck I got in contact with Wiley Publishing and was able to receive a review copy of the book. So hence I'm giving my first impressions here. Now I should mention that I am not a developer, and only an amateur webdesigner. I do have some basic PHP programming skills, and am familiar with the idea of Object Oriented Programming, which, as I discovered, is invaluable for working with this CMS. At this point I'm about half way through the book, and was impressed with the well structured approach. The concepts of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) structure of SilverStripe are explained clearly, and customizing the CMS is at least at its basic level straight forward. I like that every concept explained in the book is tied into an evolving web project, that gets a little more complex with each turn of the page. Again, I'm only half way through the book, and for a seasoned developer some of what is written might be trivial, but for those with limited programming skills this book will put you on the right track.
As a side note, the book does not simply rehash the documentation and tutorials on the official [...] website. It is stand alone and compliments in depth what's already out there. Thanks to the SilverStripe team for this book and for a great CMS.

Well written. Clear and full of usefull informations, that lets you to start creating amazing site with Silverstripe in a moment.

This books takes you from 0 - 60 in... well very quickly anyway. For an introductory book, it does a very good job at taking you through everything that you need to know and getting you right into coding and designing a useful application. I very much recommend this book!

The book contains systematic introduction to CMS SilverStripe. Even the basic topics are covered in detail, so there's practically no need to browse SilverStripe on-line documentation or forums. After reading three chapters you are aware of all the SilverStripe functions, and after another two you can extend it's already pretty extensive functionality. Last chapter covers the most common design issues and shows the best way to deal with them.

The book is an excellent newbie introduction to Silverstripe. It does a good job of methodically introducing the core principles and concepts behind Silverstripe and Sapphire and is far more accessible than the online documentation.

For experienced users it contains information that is hard(er) to find online (for example on generic views and Requirements merging) and provides a good read (having met on of the authors also makes it fun .. ;)...

Good job Silverstripers !

Still a unknown in the CMS arena, but up and coming. Good introduction and overview of SilverStripe.

Silverstripe is not a beginners CMS which makes it hard for a book to be a good resource for someone coming in to it fresh. This book hover does a pretty good job of introducing the reader to how silverStripe works.

I did feel that at times the tutorials which take up the majority of the book were too focussed on completing the current task at hand, rather than fully explaining how the individual components of the CMS work and fit together, but that is more likely my lack of php and mysql knowledge rather than a failing of the book.

The section I found most useful and exciting was the recipes section towards the back which gives quick overviews of the many different things that can be achieved using silverStripe, such as using silverStripe to generate the data for online flash applications

This book is a little outdated now as a new version of Silverstripe has been released, but it should still prove to be very valuable to any Silverstripe authors out there.

I am happy with this purchase and it is exactly what i was looking for :)

Here's the bottom line up front: The SilverStripe book offers superior re-packaging of existing SilverStripe documentation, but does not go sufficiently beyond what's already available to make this a "must-have" reference. The fleshed out examples are nice, but the book seems more appropriate to those unfamiliar with SilverStripe or other PHP MVC frameworks.

For example, the search "recipe" included in the book looks little different from the "recipe" available in the online documentation. The authors missed an opportunity to delve deeper into how to extend the search functionality or improve its performance.

System performance is notably missing from the book, and is the one topic which this book *should* have covered. The few pages concerning performance focus solely on front end performance - an important topic, for sure. However I bought the book eagerly anticipating documentation on configuring the CMS to improve performance in the admin area. The admin interface seems to slow down exponentially with site tree growth -the core of the CMS - and the book offers no text to address this issue.

Three (3) stars for well packaged documentation, but two (2) stars in the end for ignoring administrative performance.

I had expected help with the very slow speed of the admin side of Silver Stripe, and the file-handling problems of larger numbers of images but got none. The index is also woefully inadequate, e.g. alt-attribute no reference try image no reference. So that's a no from me