Advertised as a "comprehensive Joomla! reference for every administrator, developer, designer, and content manager", I expected a lot more from this book. As a PHP developer who has worked extensively with Wordpress writing custom code and templates, I'm very disappointed by the misleading product description. While good for getting acquainted with CMS concepts and getting your feet wet with Joomla for project manager types, this book is not for programmers looking for a O'Reilly-styled reference manual on coding Joomla modules or creating your own templates. There isn't a single block of PHP code anywhere in this entire book.
It leans heavily towards the non-technical aspects of Joomla and web management principles in general and seems to be written for a tech-savvy, but non-programmer lay audience. In the beginning is a chapter of non-Joomla fluff like branding (choosing a memorable logo), identifying your target audience, how to register a domain name, color schemes, search engine optimization, and choosing a hosting provider. This is all well and good for a web development principles "For Dummies" book, but for a book that's already thin at 300 pages and billed as a comprehensive reference book, this feels like an attempt at length padding. The next few chapters are about how to use the Joomla menu system itself to do things like navigate the site, upload files, and add new content, then moves onto a few examples of Joomla as used for business, schools, and non-profits, followed by useful plugins and a chapter of interviews from Joomla users, ending with an appendix of links and a glossary.
For experienced developers looking for actual technical material on how to write your own extensions and modules, you won't find it here. Discussion of CSS, the most fundamental and powerful way of changing the entire look of your site without any programming, is discussed here in a scant few pages and scattered mentions. After looking through this book, I am no closer to understanding how to work with Joomla's API and create my own templates from scratch. The jdoc statement, for example, is briefly explained in a paltry 2 pages.
In short, this is a good book for getting to know the basics of content management systems and core Joomla admin/content-creation capabilities, but for users looking to actually write code to extend Joomla's functionality, you'll find very little of use here. This book tries to be all things to all people, but it doesn't work. In the installation chapter at the beginning, for example, the book assumes your hosting provider has Cpanel and phpMyAdmin (administrators), yet the remainder of the book is very non-technical (content-managers). Somewhere, they forgot the developer. The interviews chapter takes up 38 pages and is almost completely useless to most people and reads like a product testimonial commercial. The participants are all asked many of the same questions (what attracted you to Joomla, do you use open-source software). Another nit is that the book is all black and white, minus the cover. Lastly, you get a free online version of the book, but for only 45 days.
