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Message from Dean - May 8th 2007
I am currently testing out a new version of the APF Bridge Component - If you notice any errors within this demo store please drop me a line.
Rating:  -
Being new to Joomla, but not web design and development, the book had me engaged up to the chapter on Search Engine Marketing. This topic alone seems to be the author's real interest and for this he does have some good insights. But my enthusiasm ends here.
Mastering CSS is crucial to having control over the look of your site. At best CSS is a complex subject and I promise that unless you have extraordinary mind-bending abilities at reading between the lines, you will not penetrate this mish-mash explanation of how to put together, or edit, a pure CSS Joomla template as attempted in chapter 9. I would rather wrestle a wild boar, or crack ciphers from the Wehrmacht Enigma machine than waste any more time attempting to untangle such poorly thought out material.
This book needs a major and careful rewrite. And I do mean major. If you have any experience with clearly written, precisely crafted, well edited technical books --as in anything written by David Powers, you will quickly realize that this 'guide' leads nowhere.
Rating: -
I'm a web designer and programmer who bought this book in the hope that it'd reduce my time spent on forums and disorganized blog posts trying to hunt chunks of useful information on Joomla! , yet the book was far from fulfilling my expectations.
The book doesn't provide clear definitions , doesn't cover the necessary subjects thoroughly....makes a lot of assumptions and fails to communicate the structure of joomla clearly . Especially the last three chapters are a grandeur failure ( SEO+template making being the most important chapters if you really want to learn how to have some control over joomla and how to make your site efficient and accessible)
If you're really curious about the book, download the pdf version.
I highly recommend saving your money for smthing more useful and meaningful than this book.
Rating:  -
The focus of this book is on creating a successful website using Joomla, rather than explaining every setting and feature of Joomla itself. Whilst it does comprehensively cover many of Joomla's useful features, leading the novice confidently from basic principles to more advanced concepts, it goes beyond this and gives excellent advice on how to build various types of website (blogs, schools, restaurants) as well as organizing content, using stock images, creating custom template designs, search engine optimisation, pay-per-click advertising, and more. Novices and more advanced users alike will benefit from the wealth of experience the author brings to this guide.
Rating:  -
1.) The book is based upon a release candidate and not the final release of Joomla 1.5.x which at times creates confusion.
2.) The illustrations in the book that you are supposed to refer to to make sure you are configuring things correctly are too small to make out without a powerful hand lens and thus about useless.
3.) The template for chapter 10 if you DL it from Joomla Shack is not the template that he uses. That alone cost me over 10 hours of frustration.
4.)Lastly the author refers you to his web site on many occasions and when you get there you can't find what he send you there for, just a lot of shameless self promotion and little substance.
5.)The book site is hard to find I was 3/4 through the book before I finally found it listed on the site mentioned in the book. Then when you finally get to the book site you have 2 levels of hoops to jump through to get the SQL data base for the site in chapter 10! Then when you get the DB the password is hidden on the from page of the site instead of in documentation. This cost me a few hours too.
6.) On page one of the book tech authors should have you register online so that they can email you up to date corrections to save you tons of wasted time.
This book reinforces my belief that there are 2 kinds of documentation(books) for software. Either there is NO documentation or there is POOR documentation. I think the whole paradigm has to change for tech books. Perhaps they should all be printed on demand or electronic with the user printing them so that they can updated continually.
Rating: -
If you are looking for a well written book about Joomla then this is the one. I read it from cover to cover except for one chapter. Joomla is a very powerful CMS engine, and because of that, the developers of this engine will always struggle to provide a simpler user interface and experience. In most cases simpler does really mean less powerful features. This book tries to bridge the gap, by making it simple to understand the powerful features of Joomla. Two of its final chapters are real projects that can be followed and you actually end up with decent websites.
Another reason why this book is such a good book is his recommendation for some of the commercial Joomla extensions that are available for Joomla. I made two purchases for two extensions after looking them up and comparing them against others. When I did that, I instinctively realized that this book is GOOD.
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