Customer Reviews

The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

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

 

 

I have set up contact management systems at a couple of other small companies, and am charged with doing it for my current employer. The appeal of SugarCRM to us is the degree of customization allowed, and I bought "The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM:..." to shorten the learning curve.

Overall, I found this to be an effective overview, with somewhat useful instructions for working with the customization features of the software. The content is reliably solid, and seems based on thorough knowledge of the author. Often though, it seems to fall a little short on depth, and would benefit from more detailed examples of how to do specific tasks. For example, the section on relationships describes what relationships are available, but says little about how the choices change what you can do within SugarCRM. As a guide to the top level design of SugarCRM this is a good reference, and made it much easier for me to figure out where to look and how to approach some customizations we need. As a guide to "How do I do ...?" tasks, it could use some more depth.

About the editing - this has to be one of the most poorly edited book I've seen, ever. It clearly suffers from reliance on a Word style grammar checker. Page after page has errors that most grade school students could catch. I don't expect books of this type to be great literature, but this is supposed to be a professional level book, and the errors are frequent enough to be distracting. The editing quality makes it read like a cheap novel in quite a few places. Also, the table of contents page has an obvious numbering problem. In my copy it has Part 1, Part 2, etc., as it should. Every chapter though, no matter which part, is listed as Chapter 1.

I just read this book, and it has been awesome. I have been working on a SugarCRM for the last year and this book has been very insightful. I really think that it all so address some of the advanced features that I was unsure about. I am really excited to learn all of the modifications that you can do to customize this application to suit my business needs. I am not sure what the other reviewer is talking about the code not working, but I found it all to work great for me. I would recommend this book for any beginner or someone like me who is just want to take SugarCRM to the next level in my business.

This book is required reading for me at my job, as we're developing in SugarCRM. There are no tutorials, per se. The author doesn't hold your hand and carry you through step by step on how to do anything, but there are plenty of code examples on how things will look when something is created or customized.

Why should the "author be embarrassed and the editor shot"? The editing is absolutely HORRIBLE! It's bad to the point of distraction. In some places the grammatical and typographical errors are so bad I had to re-read a sentence or paragraph several times to understand what the author was saying. There are a couple of section headers that have double quotes on one side of the title, as in: Field Overlays" - that's on page 46 and there's another case of orphan quotes on page 60. If this is indicative of the typical quality level of Apress publications, I'll make sure to look elsewhere when I'm searching for a topic!

I recently completed a SugarCRM deployment for a client and have been struggling with getting up to speed on how to perform "upgrade safe" customizations to the application using only the documentation provided by Sugar. Version 5 features some major architectural changes and, unfortunately, most of the preexisting documentation and examples are written for version 4 or earlier. Add to that, the Application and Developer's Guides provided by Sugar are quite terse with little or no background on layout, design or philosophy.

Top feature here is that the book is written for the latest version (5.5.0). It also has a decent discussion of the Model/View/Control architecture and design philosophy that folks like me who are experienced with PHP/MySQL web development but relatively new to LAMP applications need in order to get oriented and better prepared to delve into the intricate innards of this popular application.

I am giving this book four stars because there are numerous minor typographical errors and the layout is not as clean as you would expect for a book in this price range.

I have found in working with this book that it provides just the right balance to the existing documentation while supplying the sorely needed details for the version 5 architecture. Kudos to John Mertic for undertaking the task to finally create The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM!

I've read both of John's SugarCRM books and can affirm his passion and knowledge of SugarCRM may be second to none.

To get the most from this book the reader should be familiar with SugarCRM. My suggestion would be to (at minimum) read the Introduction chapter in the publicly available SugarCRM developer documentation. Familiarity with SugarCRM from an Application User perspective would also be important.

I'm in no way an experienced developer in SugarCRM, so I may be biased on this review. But I believe Mertic missed it for the not so advanced SugarCRM folks. I think the author makes too many assumptions as to what the reader may know. It almost feels like the book is written for the internal developers / support staff at SugarCRM.

I'm no beginner to SugarCRM but I think he tries to explain topics without giving enough information. In the beginning he informs the reader to download Sugar so that one can follow along and work with the examples. The problem comes when he begins explaining these examples. There is very very little information to help the reader find out what exact file he is editing. Where is he saving the file, in addition, what is the path he expects us to save the file in. A lot of the information is up in the air keeping the reader wondering 'Wait maybe just maybe I misread that' or 'Maybe I missed that point in the book I'll just re-read it'. The reader then realizes hey I didn't miss it, I re-read this section several times and it's just missing information.

A lot of the content just does not work. Let me give you an example, take page 222 regarding Accounts and Contacts. The section discusses how to create a field that displays a google map of an Account / Contact. The section mentions to set a default URL as a template which the detailview handler will fill in automatically. Good luck with that. As soon as you set the default the detailview does not fill in this template. In fact, it contains the exact URL you had to manually enter and when the page renders and the google map comes up it displays the offices of SugarCRM (huh)??The .tpl files actually store that entire string. You can't do that, you have to actually write custom code to get this to work and it isn't that simple. Here is another example, this one isn't quite wrong syntax wise but it is wrong in the form of bad practice. It's on page 32 and the code basically does a SELECT * from Users and iterates the list one by one. If the user's status is != Active (not active - inactive) then it strips the admin rights by doing a UPDATE Users SET is_admin=0 WHERE id = row[id]. This is poor practice in a number of ways, first of all SELECT * should never be used, even if you need every single column in your database you should list them out one by one. Secondly why are we bothering looping through an entire set of data to check the status of a user and then setting the admin status to false for any inactive user? Why dont we just push out ONE simple update statement, UPDATE Users u SET u.is_admin=0 WHERE u.status='Inactive' ? You are teaching possible beginners poor practice by fetching and looping through data. You are also teaching them to write too much PHP rather then understanding that this is more of a data process rather then an interface process. The MVC was preached in chapter one so one would expect to follow the rules of Model View Controller. You could argue this was a mere example to show the power of using DBManagerFactory::getInstance() but I highly doubt it.

I'm a C# developer and have been programming in VB.net, C#, C++ for quite some time. I also do a lot of work in SQL Server so I love to read anything related to programming. I thought hey finally a book on logic hooks and customizing sugar. I've read a ton on administering and setting up SugarCRM but I hadn't seen a book on development (besides the free developers guide to sugarcrm). So as soon as I saw this was available I picked it up (probably one of the first to pick it up). If you search amazon you'll almost notice that any book with SugarCRM as a title has probably a below 3 star ranking. I don't get it why can't anyone write a good solid fundamental book about SugarCRM? I find that going on the forums and reading the documentation that is on the net more beneficial. I'm just writing this to the reader who thinks to him/her self that they will become a proficient developer reading this book. It's just my 2 cents, save your money.

I saw the author's presenation at sugarcon this is the book to buy on the subject. Well written and comprehensive.

Sorry to say it but this book really is a waste of time if you are new to SugarCRM and are trying to figure out how to make customizations. It's pretty ridiculous. The writer clearly assumes that he is writing for experienced Sugar developers who, by definition don't need this book. I wish someone would write a comprehensive SugarCRM book that starts with the assumption that you are buying a "Guide to SugarCRM" because you are not yet familiar with it. What a waste of my time.