Customer Reviews

TYPO3: Enterprise Content Management: The Official TYPO3 Book, written and endorsed by the core TYPO3 Team

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

 

 

A complete waste of $60. The only helpful sections were in the extension programming chapter, which equated to about 12-20 pages of material. I ended up putting the book away and turning back to the online documentation. To make matters worse, the screenshots are now out of date, since Typo3 4.0 uses a different backend skiin than 3.8.

My recommendation, stay away, use the documentation at typo3.org instead.

I concur with the first two reviewers that the structure of this book leaves much to be desired. It lacks a good overview of the options and dives into extreme details where inappropriate.

An example: I want to replicate the sample site used in the book. The so-called soft links don't work and instead point to a German site. Eventually I found the files in English, but nobody thought about adding a simple read me file how to import the template.

I feel I probably better had stuck with the online documentation...

I work daily with Typo3, managing 3 sites utilizing it, and always working with new extensions etc.etc.

I purchased this book to help answer alot of questions in the daily management of Typo3, and found it very....very....disappointing. It had very little useful information (such as how to direct domains to subfolders, 0 information on the most common extensions, informative instruction in the use of those extensions, etc.) I am not very interested in the history of the programmers, although some information is good, you can always go to the site for more.

In todays development world, books have to interact with a associated website. A great example would be "More on CSS by Eric Myer".

So all in all, don't waste your $60 dollars, just find a friend that knows it and have him do a sit down.

Finally, an English book for this powerful CMS. For anyone struggling with the complexity of this system (even if there are more than 5000 pages of free documentation on the website), this book solves the continuity problem. It goes from installation to editors' duties, up to administration and extension development.

What I really appreciate in this book is the logical path it uses to give you the "big picture" of this complex, yet effective system. At the same time, it's also a problem with this book. They want to appeal to everybody (editors' section, development section) and in 575 pages, there's not enough pages to see it all. Sometimes while reading I was thinking "hey they should have talk about this and that"but at the same time realized that a 2000 pages book would had been too costly... Maybe a full 500 pages book on TYPO3 development would do the trick in the future.

Talking about price, you should be aware that part of the profit goes back to the TYPO3 Association and will help the core development of

TYPO3.

What is really great about this book is the Typoscript chapter. It really helps anyone having to do templating and navigation for their TYPO3 websites. I should also mention the Admin chapter as a time saver. You will get tips and tricks on how to setup Back-End Users, Groups and others configurations. It should be noted that it was revised for version 3.8 (May 2005) and so is very up-to-date.

There are about 150 pages devoted to extension development but as I stated, a full book would be welcome just to cover this subject.

Overall I highly recommend this book. When you finish it, you should have learned a great deal about this powerful CMS and feel comfortable enough to dig even more!

I have used Typo3 for more then 6 months now and it's a love-hate relationship. True, it is a complex system, and it took me quite a while to get up to speed. But once mastered, the sheer number of extensions provide an enormous resource that saves you a lot of time when you develop web-applications. I don't see Typo3 only as a content management system anymore, it is a web-application development platform. And that is where this book kicks in. I agree with other reviewers that the book is not very easy for people who get started with Typo3, but once you reach the stage of developing your own extensions, the book will guide you on that path. For beginning users, I would just recommend the videos on the typo3 website, but anybody who wants to get beyond the basics, this book is a must.

I use Typo3 for a living and all I can say is this book is terrible. I am a strong book learner, I've learned most everything about any language, software or schema through O'Reilly, Friends of Ed or Sitepoint books. I could not learn Typo3 from this book. I know, you're thinking "But Typo3 is so hard, I need a book and this is the only one, so I should just get it because it's the only choice." I thought that too but it really isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Avoid unless money is no object.

This book is a valid resource for who's approaching for the first time TYPO3, but also for those who would like to have a well organised and full detailed manual.

The book covers all the aspects of TYPO3: introduction to the cms functionalities, setting up the cms, content management and administration, template and extensions development. Very useful is the information about the funcionalities provided through installation of third party extensions.

Chapters dedicated to extension development are very well explained with a lot of examples. This is one of the most important "feature" because, before the edition of this book, documents were widespread on the net. Now the concepts are well outlined and easily learned.

There is just one negative point: the book is not based on the latest TYPO3 version (4.0) so a few new topics are not deeply explained and a few others are not explained at all (versioning and workspaces).

At the end, it's very useful book, it makes one save time and a lot of headhache, ideal for everyone who wants to start a new TYPO3 project and also for those who want a practical guide to this fantastic cms.

I read the introduction and then i skip and just select chapters that i need.

Maybe my Enlish is not good enough, and i often come across with difficult phrase that i cannot understand.

It did not setup the situation for you to follow the steps. For example, in chapter 5 TypoScript, 5.2.5 is talking about creating new page and template with a blank dummy. Immediately in 5.2.6 1st paragraph will make you in lost and they have skipped the steps to tell you to create an other new page or you will not be able to find all the buttons following.

The Structure is bad. It show you page with loads of textboxs, checkboxs, options, but without further explaination or what we have to do with it and go on to something else. What I get is, ok i know i can click to a page with loads of option, but so what?

Maybe i expect the wrong thing from this book. I would suggest the author / the editor to setup a scene for each section and show how to use the tools in the system to arhieve it. So we can easier to know how those function can be applied. Also, please rephrase it in simpler english. It is really really really painful for me to comprehence what the book want to tell.

The printing is bad, the figure is not clear.

The good thing is some of the figures in this book used number to indicate different parts in the screen shot(Those figure are used in the documentation in typo3.org which you can download it for free / with donation), but when figures are missing, the discription of button location often make me lost.

Anyway, i don't like this book, or even i hated it. But there is nothing to do with the actual system. The book is 1 star but the CMS can be 5 or 10 stars. [...]