Customer Reviews

Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website

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

 

 

I found this book very useful to get started in using Joomla! It is the type of book you can follow step-by-step or use as a reference. I started off with Joomla! just relying on the forums, however, this soon became frustrating and long-winded. Getting the book has saved me a lot of time and my website is coming on nicely.

Despite some rather harsh comments here and elsewhere, Barrie North's book is a very useful guide for the curious mind. He deserves commendation, not brickbats. One of the topics that Mr North would do well to address in an update would be foremost in the minds of many: how to go about fashioning a standard installation of Joomla to one's needs, especially when that standard installation has been made by your ISP, as happens to be the case these days. The three templates that get installed with Joomla 1.5 are not attractive (but thanks anyway) and more documentation is required about customising them. I am often asked by friends: should the installation be in a joomla folder or should it go live right away and, if in an online folder, how does one make it publishable, and so on? Joomla warriors may laugh at this simple line of questioning but these questions do preoccupy people who are keen on Joomla but also confused. A lot of the online info and 'guidance' is mind-numbing jargon that does their writers little credit. Barry North at least avoids that most of the time and, despite typos cited elsewhere and other valid criticisms, he excels in explaining the stuff. Go easy on him, and let him do an update.

As a total beginner I purchased this book to learn Joomla! When I finished reading this book (after 2 weeks of intensive practising) I was able to build a website in Joomla! What I appreciated the most, were the practical chapters where I was building 3 complete websites from scratch. That taught me the most! I can only recommend this excellent book.

As a computer literate person who is new to both Joomla and web authoring, I needed a good guide to get me started with Joomla quickly. I have read through almost the entire book and now have three Joomla! installations running, so now it the time for a review.

In many ways, this book provided me with what I needed. It starts with Joomla! installation, walks you through the basics, provides sound practical advice and ends up with worked examples to develop the concepts. But the book also has significant shortcomings.

Firstly, I'd agree with the reviewer who says that the book is poorly edited - an early example is an incorrect spelling of CMS - pretty fundamental when the book is about a CMS. Later on, in the Search Engine Optimisation chapter, we are treated to the same fact being trotted out on 3 consecutive pages. Where was the editor here? In fact, I get the impression that this chapter had been written late at night in order to meet copy deadlines at a time that the author had run out of ideas for other content. It is an interesting chapter but surely non-core to the book. The CSS chapter is another case in point. One wonders how many readers will find this of practical use given it assumes a knowledge of CSS. Whilst this is a topic the author is particularly familiar with I was left with the impression that it was an easy way of bulking out the book as opposed to a natural progression of previously covered topics.

In fact it is a shame that more space and detail was not provided for some of the basic aspects of Joomla! Several times we are advised to refer to the online Joomla! help - the author apparently oblivious to the fact that if the reader had wanted to do that then he would not have been reading the book in the first place. Yes - a lot of basics are covered, but then again some subjects are not covered adequately or even at all. An example is backups - a subject not addressed by this book at all, perhaps reflecting the fact that the author is primarily a supplier to website developers as opposed to being a developer himself. Another example is a lack of background information to help those for whom the Joomla! installation process does not work seamlessly. The author is clearly an expert in areas of Joomla! but even as a novice in web authoring I found that he is out of date in some areas and used incorrect terminology in others. (Come back please, editor!) Yet another example of missing content is that the Media Manager section neither described the significance (if any) of the Stories folder nor how to link to sound or video media.

But my most serious criticism relates to the regular and repeated advertising of the author's commercial businesses in this book. An occasional indirect reference might be acceptable but there are examples so blatant as to be cringeworthy, and some chapters refer you to his business so frequently that it simply becomes annoying. (I had a look at some example free templates from the company and decided they were not worth following up for myself.) The contract between reader and author ends up being broken and one is left with the impression with having been duped into purchasing advertising material. This simply is not acceptable.

The book styles itself as "the best easy to use guide to Joomla!". That may or may not be true but one is left with the impression that there is room in the market for a better and more authoritative and complete guide.

I bought this book a few years ago prior to putting together a couple of Jooma websites. I found it an easy read with lots of good information on design, SEO etc. and some useful pointers on how to structure content and menus etc. It is obviously out of date now with 1.6 maturing and 1.7 on the way, but if his 1.6 and future books have a similar style then I would recommend them to people starting out with Joomla.

Havent read the whole thing yet but this seems to be a helpful book for computing professionals. However, I am a bit concerned whether its now outdated since there's a new Joomla version out. Could use an update

On the positive side: A clear concise guide to using Joomla! as a CMS to build websites. The contents list is detailed and the book is easy to understand, and what I liked most was you could jump to any section of the book and throughout it gives clear guidelines and notes. Well worth the read.
I don't think I came across anything I would have liked to have seen prior to purchasing the book. Aside from not finding it earlier rather than later!