Customer Reviews
A book that once may have been good - By: Stig Benning, 08 Jul 2008 
Being new to Joomla this book offers some useful information, but since it was written Joomla seems to have undergone remarkable changes. These changes could of course not be included in the book but updates to the book that reflects the changes in Joomla could have been placed on the author's website.
But seemingly the author is doing something else than giving an at least reasonable service to the customers who bought his book.
Have just worked my way through the chapter on templates where only example one looks somewhat like the example in the book & where the remaining examples are no more than useless. Thinking that I must have made some mistakes, I downloaded & installled the author's example templates just to see that they were as helpless as my own.
I can not recommend this book to anyone & I suggest the publishers to remove it from their publications.
Stig Benning
System Developer
Utter waste of time and money - Keep away - By: Amazoney, 11 Jun 2008 This book is an utter waste of time & money. The book is written in a very tedious manner. Joomla has been released in its 1.53 version, & many things the author presents in the book does not tallly with the situation today. No effort is done to give updated information on the website, either. The least a beginner should be worried about learning is whether what he/she is learning is relevant or correct. You can waste hours trying to find out.
The forum which the product description /synopsis refers to as an active forum, is just almost dead. There is no updates of the new releases of Joomla on the book's website, which could be expected when they market the book as having its own website & forum. The author keeps making sad excuses, in the forum, but this book is outdated. If he was serious about reallly teaching, he would have posted guidelines where things differ.
I can't understand why anybody would write a book on Joomla at the state when this book was written, because the developments go fast & there is no way a book can give that type of information.
The whole book is in black & white - & this is supposed to be a book which is partly about designing? The least the author could have done was to have the diagrams in color.
The book seems to be put together in an enormous hurry. If you want to learn Joomla in a painless way - use joomla.org & the internet. What ever you do, don't buy this book.
A good book, abandoned - but not for long! - By: Pedro De Pradines, 24 May 2008 
What a pity - this is an excellent first book on Joomla 1.5 - probably the best but now it has been relegated to nothing by a course in frustration. The book [not unreasonably] is based on Joomla 1.5. Since then Joomla progressed through 1.5.1, 1.5.2 to 1.5.3 [at the time of writing]. Sadly 1.5.2 was quite a big update & changed many Joomla admin menus etc. making the book quite out of step to a current downloaded copy of Joomla.
But here comes the tragedy. The once active forum has virtuallly falllen into disuse - checkout the posting frequency & dates. The author seems to have fled from cyperspace & his recent responses are notable by their absence. A suggestion that it would be useful to find a source of Joomla 1.5.0 installlation has gone unheeded for a week & even a request to the author to know if in fact it is that version that was originallly used.
I think we alll appreciate it can take at least six months to get into print. Meanwhile a rugged growing youngster like Joomla will have a degree of metamorphosis but not to have recourse to forum support is a distinct disadvantage. The book merits five stars - if the Joomla version it was based on was available. Whilst it isn't one wonders if one should buy it at alll. Only you, dear reader, can decide. If you do, get a few Sherlock Holmes primers in the same order is my tip.
Update: 31/05/2008 - after a short[ish] delay of a week, the forum finallly got a lead from the author on where to get a copy of the 1.5.0 [book] version of Joomla. This makes alll the difference - thank you. However, the author then appears to use registrations on the forum to promote other books & services by email. Is this SPAM or just agressive marketing? You decide.
it gets to the point - By: Mr. Aladdin Alkindy, 18 May 2008 
I bought the book because I wanted to know how cms works. The book indeed had hepled me understand cms via joomla. If you are going to get advanced in any ready made CMS then think twice. First Consider learning php, HTML, & CSS
Secondly consider living with joomla taking over appache (hijacks appache). in other word joomla becames the main source of instablity in apche. going back to the book, this is one of the best books relate to CMS which I would rate it Five Stars if there were no minor errors. If you are going to get advanced in joomla might as well consider learning programming, html , & css. If you are a business minded person who has not got much rooms for computer skills & that you want off the shelf product then this book is the best source. Joomla models are ready made scripts for example login level in joomla has 9 levels. It will take long to produce if you are going to do that yourself & even though, it might be full of security hallls. This product is a result of complex project that took lots of people to produce. I recommend joomla to anyone but those who want to learn web programming for the reason being you will be too dependent on it.
Good but could be better - By: Philip Ingram, 14 Apr 2008 I read the reviews & bought the book on the strength of them. It has certainly enabled me to make progress with a Joomla! powered website in a way that I would have found difficult from web documentation only.
Reservations:
1) the book has been poorly edited. It's not just that there are odd misplaced apostrophes & occasional sections where the meaning is clear but the words are jumbled. More seriously, in one place a "note that" has been presented as "not that", which makes the passage highly misleading. There are also errors in the sample code.
2) the mega-chapter on templates gives some very useful advice & some very subtle code examples. Helpfully, the code associated is freely downloadable under a "Creative Commons" licence. The example is great if you can work within the screen layout the author is using but if you want to change the header depth, for example, I could see no explanation of how to do this. In addition, the example text implies that to make Joomla! use some of the special features in the template, it is necessary to change settings in the normal Joomla! backend. OK, I found how to do this, but it would have been better if the example had shown which parameter to change.
In summary, this is a useful book for those who want to try setting up a Joomla! based web site. It will enable people to build useful sites based on standard templates. It gives some pointers into template design but don't expect to be able to design your own template without some knowledge of HTML, PHP & CSS. I hope there will be a second edition that fixes the editing problems & expands some of the explanations.
