Customer Reviews

osCommerce Technical Manual: A Guide for Website Developers

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

 

 

Aimed at "Website Developers" the book wastes a lot of time and space on more obvious things. For example it tells you which PHP file to edit to change a string and where to in the file the string is. That's nicely done. But then it does the same thing over and over again file after file. A simple table after the first example would have done the trick. The real problem with that is the examples are in a very large font, lots of whitespace. Yet the book is small and very thin.

Basically not much content and way too expensive. This book would be worth $10 if you were not a website developer but wanted to be one someday.

This is possibly the worst purportedly technical book I have ever tried to read. It is a small, thin book. There is almost no content. I have quick reference cards that have more useful information. Even the illustrations and the typography are obstacles to try to overcome. The graphics are too crude to be useful, the font is way too large with too much whitespace.

There is no real technical overview of the software layout or the concepts underneath the structure. What coverage there is, is fragmented, disjointed and shallow. There is no good advice about what should be considered or what tradeoffs are important in putting together a site with osCommerce.

I should not have wasted so much time trying to find information in this book that could more easily be extracted from the code, and from a good book on PHP and MySQL.

I searched for "osCommerce" in the title and found five different titles on this same software by this same author. This smells to me like a crass rip-off targeted at people wanting to put up an ecommerce site. The book reveals that the author is non-technical, perky looking, and married to an engineer.

Just like his other book, "osCommerce Users Manual", this book is short on real content, and in fact repeats much of what was on that book! Both books should have been combined into one, and sold at a lower price. This guy SERIOUSLY needs some competition in osCommerce technical books. Anyone? Anyone?

I am a web designer trying to get into osCommerce, and have really struggled with this program. I worked through a store on my own but it took a very long time to get everything working, and I had to pay a PHP programmer to do the "heavy lifting." I was really happy to find this book because it answered so many questions for me. The book is aimed at non-programmers like myself, who have strong HTML knowledge but not PHP knowledge. osCommerce is a really powerful program, and it is easy to make a major mistake that brings the whole thing crashing down. This book was really helpful in easing the process for my second store, and allowing me to do more of the customizing on my own.

Wow, look, there are two kinds of people in Oscommerce: real live people like me that just want to learn it and run a store of their own. And pseudo, technical, geek snobs that only speak there own language. THIS book is for real people like me, an Oscommerce store owner, with HTML experience. It says on the cover! It's not made for techno-snobs!

It has helped me a lot, like I installed a new store by myself, without help, I could find out what the error messages MEANT and how to fix. This book made me feel welcome to the Oscommerce community, unlike the condesending attitudes on the forums that dont' want you to join there club. That is what I am talking about. This book TELLS you how to deal with these people, and they don't like that! If your one of them dont' buy it and sneer at it, that is stupid, like sneering at easier books just because you're in college. Dude, if your in college read a college book, dont' make fun of us. This is for real people who ask technical questions on the forums and got sneered AT, the people YOU are too cool to help.

Sorry this book is in plain ENGLISH, instead of geek-talk, boy, that's a crime. I LIKE how it lays out exactly how to do things so I never have to guess. TAKE THIS and CHANGE IT TO THIS! Its' AWESOME. If your sick to death like me from getting kicked around in the forums for asking a technical QUESTION, and want to learn how to use Oscommerce in depth, get this book, and stop getting kicked.

This book covered how to do everything I needed to understand osCommerce and customize it the way I wanted. Installing a web program like this is nothing like copying one onto your computer! But this book walks you through it step by step. People can post problems on the forums and never get an answer, but the solutions were already in this book in a clear, no nonsense format. I haven't tried installing a contribution yet, but now I understand how they work and may attempt it soon. I have a better understanding of this program and how it works because of this book.

As the new owners of an OS-Commerce store and with some html programming experience, we purchased this book along with the OS-Commerce Users Manual (also excellent!). We were pleasantly surprised at how well the material is presented. Not like a programmer talking to other programmers, this book is well organized and illustrated... and the instructional content is excellent! We never had to guess what the author is talking about. No searching through long chapters to find the specific item you want, each section is easy to find. We were also impressed with how easy this author makes each topic. Even after only a few days, our online store is progressing extremely well. With a section all the main "gotchas" that can happen and how to solve them, plus many, many "tips" on each topic, this has got to be one of the best e-commerce instructional books out there.

This book is so inadequate that the screen shots are often poor enough resolution that they can be difficult to read. There are things such as see the code above with the different color text. You look at the text and finally after a while you realize, "hey some of it is slightly grey" that's the different color. What a joke. All the content is about how to install and modify the look and feel of OsCommerce. If you want to know how to use the program, don't look here. Also the senarios only cover one case the one the author is using. None of the other variables you may wish addressed are even mentioned. Finally if you want instruction on details of customizing the code, forget this book.

I work as a programmer for a small web design firm and I build stores, on occasion, for clients. This book is a handy reference for me. With it, I can get a store up and running quickly. The books serves the purpose it was designed for and I use it often. The configuration steps, minor store modifications and troubleshooting steps are in the book, so I don't have to go through several forums for find some answers. The book is designed for non-technical people and is very easy to use. Even though it's designed for non-programmers, I never start a store project unless this book is within arm's reach.

The aim of the book isn't to show how to make major code changes, that is better left to programmers, as Kerry advises. If you want to install a store, make small customizations to it and ensure that it's working properly, this is a book to keep close by! All of the processes are in step-by-step fashion. Possible caveats are foreseen and clear, understandable solutions are given.

The book isn't meant to show you how to run a store - the companion book, "Managing an Online Business" (also by Kerry) is best for that. A third book, also by the same author, "osCommerce User's Manual," rounds out the education (and all three are easy to read).

Website Developers is a bit of a misnomer. It is a very good set of the basics for someone just getting started with OSCommerce, much better than the OSC Tomatoes on the cover "beginners" book. There are way too many questions left unasked and unanswered, kind of like the OSCommerce forums, for this book to be for website developers.